Spreadsheet Hell - the causes and the solutions

Spreadsheet Hell – the causes and the solutions

Does your organisation suffer from any of the following?

Unknown levels of risk with business processes underpinned by spreadsheets
Time wasted through manual reconciliations
Complex and resource intensive audit and compliance processes built on spreadsheets
Limited forecasting and modelling capabilities
Reporting deadlines missed due to ‘broken’ data
Analyst time wasted by continual cutting and pasting
Multiple versions of the same spreadsheet providing completely different results

What are the risks?

The risk of uncontrolled data within an organisation should not be under-estimated. Recently, the CFO of a well-known travel group was forced to resign, after a data integration glitch.

The data error meant that the organisation over-reported its annual revenue by £117 million. This could have easily been avoided with the right data management tools in place!

Risks we see when working with clients include:

Data errors - caused through cut and paste operations, damaged formulae and human error.
Complexities – as organisations grow, so do the processes and supporting spreadsheets.
Cost. - Spreadsheets can be labour intensive with repetitive processes for managing and manipulating complex spread sheets

What are the solutions and benefits?

By combining, cleansing and governing the data within your organisation, you can gain invaluable business insight through data that you actually trust.

The implementation of the right business intelligence solution will not only provide you with ‘one version of the truth’ but it will also allow your valued analysts to do the work they are paid for - analyse instead of manage data.

You will also be able to access and analyse statistics and reports more quickly, allowing you to make time sensitive business critical decisions more easily.

How Altius can help you discover one version of the truth

With 17 years’ experience helping our customers improve the way their businesses work, we have the knowledge and understanding to help you out of this situation.

We can provide:

An automated discovery and audit, so that you can understand the organisations current situation.
Control and governance of your companies invaluable data through technologies like Microsoft SharePoint 2010
The tools to leverage the power of spreadsheets against trusted data (through OLAP technologies including Microsoft Analysis services and Oracle Essbase)