How’s your relationship with your planning spreadsheet?

If you’re like almost every planner we talk to, it’s probably a love-hate relationship.

Most high growth brands plan supply and demand on a spreadsheet. Typically a 20+ tab monster maintained by one person.

That sheet - and that person - often represent one single point of failure for tens of millions in revenue over the next few quarters. Millions in inventory spend.

It always starts out as a nice little spreadsheet - a few tabs, well organized with clean data.

Until something happens. A spike in demand. A new channel. A supplier closes. A distribution center opens. You decide to start planning inputs and not just finished goods. The original spreadsheet owner leaves the company.

Something happens and the spreadsheet fails and everyone is left asking, ‘OK - what do we do? Can we trust the plan?’

No. We don’t trust the plan anymore.

So then it’s weeks of modeling and dozens of meetings to rebuild confidence.

Inevitably - whether it be a few months or a few quarters later - something else happens.

The cycle repeats.

When we talk to high growth brands at Atomic, this is what we hear - almost every single time.

Spreadsheets are wonderful for planning because they are fast and flexible. You make a change and - boom! - you see the impact instantly. But they are not robust. They cannot handle multiple scenarios. They cannot handle multi-dimensional complexity. It’s painful to load in refreshed data. Planners know this better than anybody.

In short, spreadsheets are a prototyping tool. They are not a production system. Prototypes are supposed to fail so we can learn. But when we are learning with live ammo - when the test environment is the same as the production environment - then failures happen in production. Which means $$, time, and confidence are lost.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! We built Atomic to give planners the flexibility and speed of spreadsheets tied to an incredibly powerful planning engine that allows for automated data connections, complex modeling, and scenario planning. So you can see the impact of changes to the plan before pulling the trigger on decisions with the confidence that nothing is ‘broken’ in a formula on a tab called ‘Nov assumptions - carl j - new4’.

And by the way - your job should not be defined narrowly by your skills at spreadsheet modeling. As a planner, your primary value-add to your company is your judgment and your expertise, not your ability to model complex supply-side logic and maintain a monster spreadsheet. When you put your plan on autopilot, you get to be strategic, and focus on exceptions and improvements.

Let go of the spreadsheet monster - it’s not a healthy relationship any more.

Ready to upgrade your planning? Get in touch with us!