Is Excel an ERP ?

Excel is a useful business tool (and has its place and time), but most manufacturers find it to be insufficient. We are the first to confess this. Excel is capable of a wide range of tasks and activities, but it is unable to handle the complexities of a custom manufacturing business. Due to the complexity of the modern industrial sector, producers want a more capable, efficient, linked, and specialized tool to manage their operations. Manufacturing organizations need a solution that matches this degree of complexity in order to stay competitive, as it is one of the most data-intensive industries out there. For improved data control, manufacturers want an integrated system that is adapted to their unique operations and procedures.

Before we go into the details of why Excel is not as much a good option as an ERP lets see the benefits of excel:

1.       User-friendly management

2.       Access to all your data on a single page

3.       No additional costs for Excel

4.       Flexible software

But even with such benefits Excel is not an ERP for the following reasons:

1. Shortcomings related to sharing information :

When you’re using Excel tables to manage inventories, sharing them can occasionally become a real pain. This drawback might be partially offset by file storage on the cloud, but not completely. The owner of the document must update it themself in order for other users to see all changes, which is necessary. Frequently, users must make supplementary tables. Manually fusing various files is laborious for a business, corporation, or organization because it necessitates substantial communication. Because of this, inventory management is out of date and cannot be trusted.

2. No automatic updates :

Multiple modifications including material utilization, product sales, and inventory management are necessary. To reduce the possibility of error, a significant “time investment” is therefore needed to track each new action. This is without a doubt one of the most important criteria for professionals looking to adopt ERP software within their company, corporation, or organization.

3. Incompatibility with accounting software

You won’t have any compatibility with other software, including accounting software, if you manage your inventory with Excel. It is impossible to quantify the cost of inventory flow immediately (for lack of attachments).

4. Inaccessible overview

Without real-time updates, it is challenging to acquire an overview of inventory management. Sharing Excel files among many departments invariably makes such oversight more difficult. The delay that results from the requirement to update “out-of-date” data.

5. Manual input often means error and data loss

Internet users won’t be surprised to learn that each data point must be manually entered when using Excel for inventory management. Nevertheless, making mistakes is part of being human. and inaccurate information about inventory management always results in chaos! In other situations, a few sloppy changes can potentially corrupt or destroy data. A business, corporation, or organization’s operations are immediately hampered by the loss of this information. Additionally, Excel lacks a capability for data tracing. Due to this flaw, it is challenging to detect incorrect inputs.

For such short-comings an excel cannot be as efficient as an ERP in an industry. The aforementioned details ably illustrate ERP software’s usefulness for recording crucial data for firms, corporations, and organizations. Enterprise resource planning software does indeed offer a wide range of advantages from the moment it is implemented. It’s time to think about an ERP implementation if your internal team is still managing their daily operations with Excel. Excel can be useful in some situations, but it doesn’t provide nearly the capacity that an ERP system can.