A small change to an order, a full day of coordination
It is 8:30 in the morning. A customer calls and asks to move a delivery from 10:00 to 12:00. The operations manager updates the file at once, but the warehouse has already printed the loading plan, the driver has received the route, and the service desk is still working from the previous information.
By the time the gap is found, two more deliveries are delayed.
No one made a large mistake. Each person acted on the information they had. The problem was that the information was not the same.
This is a familiar difficulty in distribution organizations that run the operation through Excel spreadsheets. What began as a convenient way to plan routes has, over the years, become the place where orders are updated, exceptions are recorded, drivers are tracked, and someone tries to understand what went wrong.
Excel remains a useful tool. There is a difference, though, between a spreadsheet that helps an operations manager make decisions and a file that the whole distribution operation depends on.
Large organizations still work in spreadsheets
An international survey by ABC Supply Chain included 164 professionals in sales and operations planning, S&OP and IBP. About 81% of them said they manage planning with Excel or Google Sheets, including in some organizations that already run advanced ERP systems.
Source: ABC Supply Chain S&OP survey
The survey is not about distribution alone, but it shows how deeply spreadsheets are embedded in organizational processes.
A further figure comes from a Cargoclix survey of 55 of the company's customers. Nearly 35% of respondents said that moving between Excel spreadsheets, email, and phone calls significantly complicates daily operations.
Source: Cargoclix survey findings
It is a small survey and it is not representative, but the pattern it describes is familiar: when the same information passes through several tools, each extra handoff creates room for a gap.
Each department has its own file
In a distribution organization you can find one spreadsheet for planning delivery routes, another for tracking customer calls, and a further file for billing.
Each department built the solution that was convenient for it. Nobody planned, in advance, to create several versions of the same order. It simply developed over the years.
Sometimes the problem goes deeper. A long-serving operations manager keeps a file built and refined over years, with formulas and notes that only that person knows. From that person's point of view, everything works well. When that person is away, someone else has to work out how the file operates and what has changed since the last update.
As long as nothing goes wrong, that dependency is barely felt. It shows up on the day a decision has to be made quickly.
Three conversations from the field, one problem
In conversations with operations and distribution managers, a few answers stayed with me.
When I asked an operations manager how many versions of the same delivery exist at their site in the morning, she started counting: "One in the warehouse, one at the service desk, one in my file, and one with the driver."
Another manager explained how he checks that a delivery route was updated: "I call the driver and ask."
A veteran distribution manager put the concern in one sentence: "I am not afraid of mistakes. I am afraid of finding them at 11 in the morning."
The three answers describe different situations, but the shared problem is clear. Without an agreed source of information, it is hard to know which version reflects what is actually happening.
A missing system is not always the issue. Sometimes the connection is
Many organizations already run an ERP for orders, inventory, and business processes, and a CRM alongside it for the customer relationship.
Those systems do not have to be replaced in order to improve distribution.
A system built for distribution management can receive the order data, plan delivery routes, pass tasks to drivers, and record what happens in the field. Depending on the interfaces that were defined, the relevant information can go back to the organization's systems.
The service desk, operations, and the warehouse can then work from shared information, instead of sending updated files to one another.
The connection between systems does not solve every problem. After implementation, someone still has to decide who may approve a change to an order, what happens when a truck has already left, and which updates need to reach each party.
The difference is still significant. Instead of trying to find out which file is the latest, the process can be run on information recorded in the connected systems.
Running distribution from several files?
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Before AI, the data has to be trustworthy
Organizations want to use AI to improve route planning, anticipate load, and spot problems earlier.
That analysis is limited when the data is scattered across files and departments.
Arrival times, unloading duration, delivery exceptions, and order changes can teach a great deal about the distribution operation. If the information is not collected systematically, patterns are hard to see and hard to learn from.
Consistent records from the field make it possible, for example, to identify customers where unloading takes longer again and again, areas with regular delays, and delivery routes that need to be looked at again.
These are figures that can be worked with. They let a team examine decisions against what actually happened, not only against the original plan.
The bottom line
There is no reason to remove Excel from the organization. It is still an excellent tool for calculations, checks, and data analysis.
A whole distribution operation should not depend on one file, or on several files that are not updated together.
Almost every operations manager knows how to work well with Excel. The question is whether the organization can keep working well without relying on that person's file.
Further reading: טרנספורמציה דיגיטלית בהפצה: למה קשה ודחוף להוציא את הראש מה-Excel (original article in Hebrew by Irit Lotan, published on People & Computers).
