[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article-body-the-spreadsheet-is-the-last-place-thinking-is-allowed":3},"\nTwenty years of planning platforms, and the market's best-kept open secret is\nthis: a survey of 164 S&OP professionals across 54 countries found 81% of\ncompanies still run the process in Excel or Google Sheets\n([AbcSupplyChain, November 2025](https://abcsupplychain.com/sales-operations-planning-survey/)).\nA modest sample, but an unambiguous signal, and many of the respondents own\ntop-tier planning systems at the same time. They paid for the platform. They\nplan in the spreadsheet.\n\nThe standard explanation is resistance to change, followed by a training\nbudget. The standard explanation has now failed for two decades, which\nsuggests it was never the explanation.\n\n*People do not retreat to Excel out of nostalgia. They retreat to it because\nit is the last place their judgement is allowed to operate.*\n\n## What the spreadsheet actually offers\n\nWatch a planner or an analyst work and the pattern is consistent. The system\nof record holds the official numbers. The spreadsheet holds the thinking: the\npromotion that was cancelled yesterday, the customer who is quietly switching\nsupplier, the production line that goes down for maintenance next month, the\nregulation that changes the labelling in March.\n\nNone of that is in the master data. All of it belongs in the plan. The\nenterprise system offers no way in, so the knowledge goes where it can go: a\ntab, a column of manual overrides, a side model held together by one person's\ndiscipline.\n\nThat is not indiscipline and it is not a skills gap. It is a verdict on the\ntools, not on the team.\n\n## The shadow copy is a requirements document\n\nEvery large organisation runs what amounts to a thousand and one planning\nsystems: the official one, and a thousand spreadsheets correcting it. Most\nsoftware vendors read this as a compliance problem and respond with lockdown,\nclosing the exports, mandating the platform, retraining the users.\n\nLockdown fails, and it deserves to. The shadow spreadsheet estate is the most\nhonest requirements document the organisation owns. Each workaround marks a\nplace where the official tool could not hold something a person knew to be\ntrue. Confiscating the workaround does not transfer the knowledge into the\nsystem. It deletes the knowledge.\n\n> The best tool is the one your team actually uses. A platform that is\n> bypassed is not a platform. It is a licence fee.\n\n## Upgrade the thinking, not the tool\n\nThe way out is not to defeat the spreadsheet but to give the judgement that\nlives there a proper home: one that keeps the freedom and adds what freedom\nalone cannot provide.\n\nThree upgrades matter:\n\n- **Memory.** An override typed over a forecast should be recorded as a\n  decision: who adjusted, by how much, on what reasoning. Research covering\n  roughly 147,000 forecasts found that judgemental adjustments improved\n  accuracy for only just over half the items examined ([Fildes, Goodwin and\n  De Baets, International Journal of Forecasting,\n  2024](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207024000736)).\n  Half the forecast is a person, and nobody scores that half.\n- **Scoring.** Once overrides are remembered, they can be scored. The planner\n  whose adjustments beat the model keeps making them with evidence behind\n  her. The adjustment class that consistently destroys value gets retired.\n  Nobody's freedom is removed. Its results simply become visible.\n- **An audit trail.** When the number feeds a board pack or a regulator, the\n  chain from data to decision has to survive scrutiny. A spreadsheet cannot\n  provide that. A decision layer can, without taking the spreadsheet away.\n\n*Exploration stays free. It simply stops being invisible.*\n\nThe endpoint is not a world without Excel. It is a world where the spreadsheet\nis a window onto a system that remembers, scores and audits what the person\nin front of it decides. Nobody is asked to leave the place they think.\n\nThis is how Prophesee treats the people it works with. Judgement is an input\nto be captured and scored, not a behaviour to be trained away. See it on\nyour own data. [Start here](/contact).\n",1786786820104]