Seems like from all quarters of the organization folks start building their own spreadsheet models to cope with informational shortcomings.
Here's a great article on this topic coming out of the supply chain.
At first, I was very confused when reading the title of this paper -”Do More with Less”. There is nothing “less” about SAP. Maintenance costs are “more”, you need to buy “more” modules to satisfy the same business problem, implementations take “more” time, you need “more” hardware to run each upgrade, you need “more” consulting time for business process reengineering …
So shouldn’t the paper be titled “Do Less with More”? Just try running a Google search on “SAP overrun cost” and see the results. Or “SAP maintenance costs”.
Or, I thought, perhaps the paper is referring to the fact that SAP is getting “less” license revenue, so the paper is about SAP becoming more efficient itself? That just didn’t compute, so I knew I had to read the paper.
Well, I think I found my answer. Buried in the paper is the following statement:
“Management by spreadsheet is a reality, and it’s not going away any time soon”.
So finally, the admission that the functionality provided by SAP is simply not good enough so everyone has to resort to spreadsheets to get anything done. And in a paper sponsored by SAP. Wow.