Planning outside your ERP: why Excel takes over and what to do about it

It sounds familiar: your company has an ERP, that ERP has a planning module, and yet the real schedule sits in an Excel file on one planner's computer. Every morning that file is updated, by noon it is out of date again, and anyone who wants to know where an order stands walks over to that one person.

Planning outside your ERP is not the exception. In most manufacturing companies and technical SMEs we talk to, it is the norm. This article is about why that happens, what it quietly costs you, and which options you have to fix it without throwing your ERP overboard.

Why the schedule moves out of the ERP

Nobody decides on a Monday morning to start planning in Excel. It creeps in, and almost always for the same reasons.

The planning module does not plan the way you plan

An ERP planning module is built for the ERP vendor's average customer. You plan by machine, by shift, by technician or by the customer's delivery date. The module plans by work order and operation. That difference looks small, but it means the planner fights the system every day instead of working with it.

Exceptions are the rule

A rush order from a good customer, a machine that breaks down, a supplier running late. In Excel you drag a row up and you are done. In the ERP you click through three screens to achieve the same thing, if it is possible at all.

Speed wins

A planner who has to move something ten times a day picks the tool that responds fastest. Excel responds in half a second. The ERP module loads, validates and asks for confirmation.

The file belongs to the planner

Excel gives one person full control. That feels safe and clear. It is also exactly the problem, but we will get to that.

Nobody looks at what is in the ERP

If the rest of the company does not get the schedule from the ERP anyway, there is little reason to put it there. The file becomes the truth, the ERP becomes a place for orders and invoices.

What it costs you

The cost of planning in Excel never appears on an invoice. That is why it is underestimated. This is what we see in practice.

One person is a single point of failure. When the planner is ill or on holiday, production does not stop, but the knowledge does. Who knows which tab is current, which colour means what, and which row is actually already finished?

Double entry. Orders come into the ERP and are retyped into the schedule. When the customer changes something, it has to change in two places. Sooner or later those drift apart, and then it is anyone's guess which version is right.

"Where is my order?" is a phone call. Sales cannot look it up. The customer cannot look it up. Every status question interrupts the planner, and there are more of those in a day than you think.

Capacity becomes a gut feeling. As long as the schedule lives in a file, "can we still take this on?" is an estimate based on experience. That works until it does not, and then it usually goes badly wrong.

Reporting after the fact. Planned versus actual hours, delivery reliability per customer, utilisation per machine. All figures you would want to pull from the ERP, but that never ended up there.

When it is not a problem

Not every company needs to act on this. If you work with five people, your planner has ten years of experience and your orders are manageable, leave it as it is. Putting software on a process that works is throwing money away.

It does become a problem when:

• several people want to work in the schedule at the same time
• the shop floor, sales or customers need to see the status
• you are growing and the planner is starting to lose the overview
• your ERP needs figures that only exist in the schedule
• your delivery reliability suffers from changes nobody sees

Recognise two or more? Then it is worth looking at the options.

Three ways to solve it

1. Configure the planning module in your ERP after all

The cheapest option, if it works. Sometimes the module was never properly set up and the problem lies in the configuration, not the software. A day with your ERP partner and an honest test by the planner will quickly give you the answer.

The honest caveat: if your way of planning really deviates from what the module can handle, the planner will be back in Excel within three weeks. Then you have lost time.

2. A standard planning tool next to the ERP

There are solid off-the-shelf tools for production scheduling. They are faster and more visual than most ERP modules, and for companies with a fairly standard production flow they are a good choice.

The caveat here: the integration with your ERP is often limited to what the tool supports out of the box. If you work with a less common ERP or with your own fields and workflows, you are back to retyping. Read our article on custom software versus an off-the-shelf package for more on that trade-off.

3. A custom planning layer on top of your ERP

This is the option we build most often, and it is no coincidence that it is the one closest to Excel. The principle:

• The ERP remains the source for orders, items, customers and invoicing. Nothing changes there.
• The planning layer reads that data through an API integration. Orders appear automatically, without retyping.
• The planner plans in a screen built around your way of working: by machine, by shift, by technician, dragging and dropping like in Excel, but with rules that catch mistakes.
• Everyone sees the same schedule. The shop floor on a screen in the hall, sales in the browser, the customer in a portal if you want.
• Status flows back to the ERP, so you do get the figures there that you are missing today.

The difference with Excel is not that the planner has to work differently. The difference is that the file is no longer a file.

What that looks like in practice

For Samoco, an industrial assembly company, we built SolveIT: a central platform that brings together hours of employees and subcontractors, project data and purchase orders, and synchronises automatically with their existing systems. The existing tools stayed, the retyping disappeared. The result: seven working days per month of administration that no longer needs doing.

For Sarens it was about planning rented-out equipment across hundreds of projects. The list view in their platform was no longer enough, so we built an interactive timeline that shows per project and across all projects what is where, zoomable from day to year.

Two different companies, the same pattern: the existing system stays, and a layer goes on top that does what the system itself could not.

Where to start tomorrow

You do not need to start a project to know whether this applies to you. Three things you can do this week:

1. Count the phone calls. Have the planner track for one week how often someone asks where an order stands. The number almost always surprises.
2. Open the Excel file with someone else present. If the planner needs ten minutes to explain tabs, colours and abbreviations, you know how dependent you are.
3. List what lives in two places. Everything entered both in the ERP and in the schedule is double work that an integration can take over.

With those three lists you have a clear picture of the pain. Whether that calls for custom software, a standard tool or simply a better configuration of your ERP is something we are happy to look at together. Also when the answer is that you are better off changing nothing.