Excel-Based Manual Scheduling – Replacement

Do you maintain a complex Excel workbook to do your scheduling?

Do you have countifs to keep track of your tallies, macros to help with your computations, or pivot tables to help with your computations?

Do you use conditional appearances or manual fill color and text color to highlight problems or key parts of the schedule?

Does someone have to go in every week or two to manually update the schedule, carefully entering new data, tweaking the results, trying different options – spending hours to produce an updated schedule?

Does the spreadsheet work – with due TLC – but aspects of it are a mystery?

If any of this sounds familiar, Stottler Henke could help you replace your spreadsheet-based manual scheduling solution with a customized scheduling solution tailored to your needs.

Time and time again, we have seen impressive and elaborate schedules maintained in Excel.

It requires an expert user who is very familiar with the domain and all its ins and outs, and lots of time.

This can be very effective, but also very limiting:

• It is usually very time-consuming, with limited ability to do “what-if” scenarios and studies
• It requires a high level of domain expertise
  • New schedulers need an extended apprenticeship before they are effective
  • The scheduler must know what to check for. Critical cases may have conditional appearance coloration to highlight issues, but often the scheduler simply knows what cells to check, and what values are acceptable
  • If scheduling personnel are unavailable unexpectedly, it can be catastrophic
    • Loss of institutional knowledge
    • Recreation of a process that had been perfected, usually in much less sophisticated form
  • Every personnel changeover risks massive loss of knowledge
• Information encoded in the spreadsheet tends to become more arcane and mysterious through time
  • Why is there a .8 multiplier in this cell? Why was that cell highlighted in red?
  • The most customized and automated Excel spreadsheets are especially vulnerable, because a small percentage of Excel users are familiar with macros and some of the more obscure formulas that may have been used to tame a difficult scheduling domain

Stottler Henke has worked with a wide range of clients to replace manual scheduling in Excel with bespoke scheduling tools. Indeed, most of the domains listed under “Specializations” were managed with Excel before the client switched to Aurora, because their scheduling domains were too specialized for a generic tool such as MS Project or Primavera to be effective.

In each of these cases, Stottler Henke was able to take processes that were very time-intensive and automate the common cases and logic so that a comparable schedule could be produced in a tiny fraction of the time.

This then freed work time for other tasks, or for doing additional analysis and improvement on the schedule.

In Excel-based scheduling domains, it is especially important to permit manual edits of the schedule, and be able to update effectively around those edits. That allows experienced users to retain control over their schedules, and handle the rare cases where the default handling is less effective.