Still Looking For A Way To Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

We use Excel spreadsheets everyday. We use them to prepare budgets and reports. We even use them when drafting plans and forecasts. With this ubiquitous office application, entering data and carrying out on-the-spot computations and analysis is quick and easy. However, when it’s time to consolidate Excel data, I won’t be surprised if you wished there was an easy way.

In fact, you were probably looking for a solution before landing on this page, right?

Because budgeting, reporting, planning, and forecasting are normally done by a group of people and not just by one individual, spreadsheets bearing the necessary data can be scattered in different folders, desktops, offices, and, in the case of really large organisations, geographical locations.

How are these data brought together? Through email attachments or by sharing folders in a local area network. Each member of the working team sends out copies of their own spreadsheets to other members, who then review them, make necessary changes, then send back to the source. The files can go back and forth until everyone is satisfied.

With each sending, sharing, and edit, business critical data gets exposed to all sorts of spreadsheet risks. Copy-paste errors, omission of a negative sign, erroneous inputs, accidental deletions, and even fraudulent manipulations can take place. And because each member can end up with multiple versions of a single spreadsheet, the chance of working on the wrong version exists.

So when all the data gets consolidated and finalised, it is possible for the end product to contain significant errors. It may not happen all the time, but it certainly can happen.

But that’s not the only disadvantage of spreadsheets. The entire process of comparing cells and sheets, copy-pasting data, linking cells, writing formulas, and specifying ranges can be very tedious, not to mention time-consuming. With spreadsheets, beating deadlines is always an almost impossible exercise.

What you need is a solution that will no longer require you to consolidate Excel spreadsheets. One that is faster, more reliable, and significantly less error-prone. Denizon has a server-based solution that has all those capabilities and much more.

With a server-based solution, all your data is stored in one place. Everyone is working on the same data source, so consolidation is fast and easy. Everyone becomes synchronised and no one has to worry about working on the wrong version.

Read more about our server-based solution

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Still looking for a Way to Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

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Implementing Matrix Management

Matrix management is a culture change. More than the hierarchical structures, lines of responsibilities, modes of communication and channels of decision-making, it is a concept that needs to be planned ahead and managed appropriately over time.

Implementing matrix management to any organization can be confusing. It is essential to ensure that it fits right to your business strategies, skills and competencies. With this, realizing matrix management should not be taken lightly. Careful stages should be considered, instead.

Here are the steps to proper implementation of matrix management:

Consider Your Business Context

You need to evaluate your organisation to analyse what are your development needs with regards to skills, products, services and market environment. This will help you decide on what type of matrix structure you will apply in your organisation. Consider the following questions in building up your context:

What is our strategy?
Where are the demands in our business?
What are the structures that our competitors currently employ?
What are the talents that my people possess?
What are other business organizations doing?

Set Your Implementation Scope

Next, you need to define the parameter and set the scope of your implementation. What area in your business do you think matrix management will successfully work? There are several things that you need to consider in setting your scope. You have to make sure that it works well with your overall business strategies, that it can be excellently communicated and easily understood. Also, you must ensure that you acquire the necessary talents and skills in the business to deliver the new system of responsibilities.

Implement the New Structure

When you have already decided what structure type you will implement, you are ready to give it a go. You will need to establish new communication channels so you can monitor the progress and receive feedback effectively.

Here?s how to apply the matrix structure:

Highlight your development needs
Define roles based on outputs and not inputs
Line up procedures and systems to support the structure and the behaviour that comes with it.
Invest in training and development
Support the key people in the structure by coaching them to better adapt in changes
Communicate regularly
Monitor progress and make necessary adjustments

Review the Matrix Structure, Roles and Responsibilities

Organisations that successfully implement matrix management adapt to the changes in their environment. With this, they do regular evaluations to highlight the need for changes and revisions. The review can either focus on the structure only or to the entire process as a whole. The results can alter the structure, the roles involved and the responsibilities taken.

The process of implementing matrix management follows a step-by step method. Each stage is equally important with the rest. Hence, if you plan to exploit it in your organisation, you have to recognise the purpose of each step and follow it appropriately. Balance is the key. And when you achieve stability in matrix management, amidst the complex changes in the world of business, then your organisational success is just around the corner.

A Business Case for Sharing

We blogged about sharing services in a decentralised business context recently, and explained why we think why these should be IT-Based for speedy delivery. This is not to say that all shared services projects worldwide have been resounding successes. This is often down to the lack of a solid business case up front. We decided to lay out the logic behind this process.

Management Overview ? The overview includes a clear definition of why the current situation is unacceptable, the anticipated benefits of sharing, and an implementation plan were it to go ahead. The project should not proceed until the stakeholders have considered and agreed on this.

Alternatives Considered ? The next stage is to get closer to the other options in order to determine whether an alternative might perhaps be preferable. Substitutes for shared services are often doing nothing, improving the current method, and outsourcing the service to a third party.

The Bottom Line in Business ? Sharing services comes at an initial cost of infrastructure changes, and the impact on human capital (the latter deserves its own blog). The following need careful consideration from the financial angle:

Numbers to Work Through

Manpower to design and roll the project out in parallel with the existing organisation.

Capital for creating facilities at the central point including civil works, furniture and equipment and IT infrastructure.

The costs of travel, feeding and accommodation. These can be significant depending on the time that implementation takes.

The opportunity loss of diverting key staff – and the cost of temporary replacements – if appointing line staff to the project team.

Crystal-clear project metrics including (a) the direct, realisable savings (b) the medium and long-term effects on profit and (c) where to deploy the savings

Risk Management

Shared services projects don’t go equally smoothly, although planning should reduce the risk to manageable levels. Nonetheless it is important to imagine potential snags, decide how to mitigate them and what the cost might be.

We believe in implementing shared services on a pilot basis in the business unit that eventually provides them. We recommend building these out to other branches only when new processes are working smoothly.

Moving On From a Decision

We recommend you revisit your management overview, the logic behind it, the assumptions you made, and the costs and benefits you envisage before deciding to go ahead

The final step in proving a business case is doable should be fleshing out your roadmap into a detailed operations plan with dependencies on a spreadsheet.

Saving Energy Step 3 ? Towards a Variable Energy Bill

Do you remember the days when energy was so cheap we paid the bill almost without thinking about it? Things have changed and we have the additional duty of reducing consumption to help save the planet. This is the third article in our mini-series on saving energy. It follows on from the first that explored implementing a management system, and the second listing practical things to implement on the shop floor. These open up the possibility of the variable energy bill we expand on as follows.

If ?variable energy bill? sounds strange to you, I used the unusual turn of phrase to encourage you to view things in a different light. We need to move on from the ?pie chart? mentality where we focus on the biggest numbers like materials, facilities and labour, and zoom in on energy where we can achieve similar gains faster with less pain. But first, we need to see beyond the jargon that governments and consultants love, and get to grips with the reality that we can vary our energy bill and bring cost down.

As executives we recognise this, although other pressures distract us from accepting it as a personal goal. And so we delegate it down the organisation to a level where it becomes ?another crazy management idea? we have to follow to stay out of trouble. I read somewhere that half the world?s organisations do not have energy as a defined objective to monitor in the C Suite. No wonder commerce is only pecking away at energy wastage at a rate of 1% per year.

Find out where you are ?spending energy? and relate this to your core business. If there are places where you are unable to make a connection, challenge the activity?s right to exist. Following the energy trail produces unexpected benefits because it permeates everything we do.

Improved product design reducing time spent in factory
Streamlined production schedules reducing machine run times

Less wear on equipment reducing costly maintenance

A more motivated workforce that is prouder of ?what we do?

As you achieve energy savings you can pass these on in terms of lower prices and greater market share. All this and more is possible when you focus on the variables behind your energy bill. Run the numbers. It deserves more attention than it often gets.