Almost every mid-sized company has this one file. It has a name like 'Dispatch_final_2019_NEW.xlsx', it sits on a drive nobody really wants to look after any more, and it keeps a process running that an expensive system was officially supposed to handle. Nobody touches it. The person who maintains it knows exactly what they're doing — and nobody else quite does. When IT talks about digitalisation, this file counts as the original sin: uncontrolled, unsecured, a risk with column headers. I see it differently. This file isn't the problem. It's the most honest diagnosis the company owns about itself.
The urge to get rid of it is understandable. A process-critical Excel file breaks every rule you were ever taught about clean systems. There are no permissions, no audit log, no versioning beyond the word 'NEW' in the filename. It hangs on a person rather than on a process. And yet a part of the operation runs through it that was never properly mapped anywhere else. That's exactly the point: it doesn't exist out of laziness. It exists because the official process has a gap at that spot — and someone had to close it, with the tool that happened to be within reach.
Why the file came into being at all
No process-critical spreadsheet appears out of nowhere. It's always an answer. At some point there was a requirement the ERP couldn't handle, a special case the standard software didn't know, an intermediate step that was simply missing from the official workflow. And instead of setting up a project, a colleague spent an afternoon building a spreadsheet that closes exactly that gap. She did nothing forbidden. She kept the operation running at a point where the system had let her down.
Over the years the spreadsheet has become an institution. A column was added because a new supplier had a special price. A tab was added because one site needed its own logic. A formula was added that nobody fully understands any more, but everyone is afraid to touch. What began as a stopgap now carries a real process — one that nobody ever wrote down, because it was never planned, only grown. The file is the log of that growth. It shows exactly where reality diverged from the official workflow, step by step, over years.
Excel shows you where your process was never clarified.
A project where the file became the map
In one of our projects, a file exactly like this was to be replaced. A manufacturing company; for years, order dispatch had run on an Excel file with eleven tabs, maintained by a single person who was due to retire in the autumn. The brief sounded simple: pour it into a proper application before the knowledge walked out of the door with the colleague. On paper, a replacement project. In truth it was something else, and that became clear in the very first week.
We didn't start building straight away. First we read the file — column by column, tab by tab, together with the colleague who maintained it. And out came what no requirements document ever mentioned: column K sometimes held numbers, sometimes abbreviations, sometimes both, and for every entry the colleague knew exactly what it meant. An 'S' after the quantity meant this customer wants consolidated deliveries. A red cell meant a special agreement was in play that was recorded nowhere in the ERP. These rules were the real process — and they lived solely in her head and in the colours of a spreadsheet.
In this one file we found around fourteen such silent rules. Fourteen decisions that were made every single day without ever being written down anywhere. Three of them nobody could explain in the end — not even the colleague who maintained them. They had been introduced at some point, for a reason long forgotten, and had simply run along ever since. Had we translated the file blindly into an application, we'd have carried those three rules across without knowing whether they still held. We'd have cast a misunderstanding in concrete.