Beyond Excel: unleashing agribusiness potential with digital tools

When the concept of a “computer” first made it to the mainstream business world, the technology filled an entire room.

Now, practically everyone in business has a computer small enough to throw in a backpack — and it can do about 100x more than what those first old-school computers could.

The point is: technology evolves. And just because a tool served its purpose and was high-functioning in a specific environment, doesn’t mean it will remain the most efficient, effective tool on the market when conditions change.

This is the case with our old friend:

Excel.

How Excel became ubiquitous across the Ag industry

You know that green icon well — and for good reason. Here are just a few things the Ag retail industry uses Excel for:

• Price lists

• Net sheets

• Product info master lists

• Customer lists

• Location codes

• Sales trend analyzers

• Rebate calculations, allocations, and forecasts

• Rebate payment allocations or reconciliation statements

Internally at Smartwyre we use Excel extensively too: for transaction record or price list uploads, reconciliation projects, customer presentations, financial forecasting, and more.

Excel has been extremely effective in the Ag world — and general business world — for so many reasons:

• You can store practically anything in it.

• It can calculate roughly 90% of anything you’ll need to answer in any business context.

• Flexibility — you can make your files as complex or simple as they need to be.

• Its visual elements, like data summaries, trends, and graphs, are great ways to understand (and explain) your data.

• Mistakes aren’t final. It only takes a couple clicks to fix something.

• It’s easily shareable (just attach it to an email, and off you go)

• Affordability and ROI — it’s cheap to purchase (as a subscription or one-time license) and the value you get back is massive compared to the initial cost of the tool

You can trust what’s in it. Since you’re the one who built the spreadsheet and inputted the data, you can be confident it’s correct.

For many years, solely relying on this tool worked. Sure, it might have been time-consuming to maintain. But Excel gave agribusinesses what they needed. That little green icon was there every step (or cell) of the way.

Now, though? Technology has improved. And if you’re still solely relying on Excel to run your agribusiness, you’re already behind.

Excel: Great for a single person. Not so much for entire teams

If you’re working solo and want to keep track of a variety of data points, Excel is something of a miracle (for all those reasons outlined above). It’s easy. It’s simple (or complex, if you need it to be). It’s robust. It’s fixable when your eyes start to cross and you accidentally input some extra 0s where they shouldn’t be.

But, as soon as a spreadsheet’s authors and customers expand beyond just one person, Excel becomes inefficient, inaccurate, and just plain frustrating … for everyone involved.

And that’s just internally within one company. When data is moving via Excel spreadsheets between entire organizations, these problems are just exacerbated. Too often, agribusinesses are emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth filled with price lists, transaction records, net sheets, and more. It’s no wonder the industry is plagued with data health issues.

In all this messiness, incorrect data and long-term input problems can persist for months or even years. As we’ve written about before, bad data can mean bad bottom lines.

The downside of Excel for agribusinesses

Times have changed, to give the understatement of the year. In a world of fast-moving data, constantly shifting prices, and bigger (often more distributed) teams, old-school Excel just can’t keep up with it all.

The tool has several pitfalls — which, in previous eras of business, might not have had as large of an impact. But today, efficiency, accuracy and speed are more important than ever just to keep up. Excel’s “little” inefficiencies and issues could all have a massive impact on your bottom line:

• Consistency of use: Does everyone use each cell the same way? Unless all data entry is consistently structured via drop-downs and data validations, a shared file quickly fills up with junk. As more people have access, problems grow exponentially, not linearly. We saw this firsthand when we analyzed one crop protection business’s net sheet — it had an error in more than 60% of the SKUs we reviewed.

• Key person risk: Here’s a fun surprise for an agribusiness: when a key individual running an Excel spreadsheet hands in an unexpected resignation. And if that person was the only person running the show? Yikes. Now what?

• Information security: Anyone can email, share, print, extract, or upload an Excel sheet. And this is horrible news for a company’s information security. The even worse news is that most agribusinesses are using Excel for their most sensitive data: prices and customer transactions.

• Auditing and history tracking: Who changed each cell? Why? Where did this new data come from? Has everyone in this sheet consistently added notes? Why is the info I input yesterday gone now? These are the questions that can eat away an entire workday (and potential profits…)

• Version control: Let’s say someone changes a piece of data in a shared Excel sheet, then attaches it to an email or uploads to a sharepoint. How do you know you have the most recent copy of the spreadsheet? It says v6, but are you sure there’s no v7? What if everyone is actually on v9?! It’s like a Russian doll nightmare, but with spreadsheets.

It’s time to evolve even more

With all those potential hangups hurting your bottom line, the time to shift is now. Agribusinesses should prioritize migrating to tools that can keep up with the complexity and pace of change in the Ag retail supply chain.

Smartwyre’s platform was built solely for that purpose. It offers:

• Real-time, accurate cost data (beyond just a static spreadsheet that requires someone to manually input figures)

• Automatic calculation of rebate incentives, cutting down on hectic year-end reconciliation from your team

• Sales, purchase, and rebate data all in one place

• Ability to instantly publish custom price lists (no more emailing those Excel spreadsheets)

• A central system for supply and demand planning

So don’t get caught behind the times. If you’re ready to pat Excel on the back, thank it for its excellent service, and move your organization to a more current, robust solution, contact our team today.