Walk into any SME machine shop or fabrication unit and you will find them: the spreadsheets. They are the backbone of British manufacturing. We use them for quoting, for the production schedule, and for tracking who is working on what.
On the surface, spreadsheets feel free. You already own the license, your team knows how to use them, and they are infinitely flexible. But if you are managing a shop floor with twenty or thirty people and your main tool for visibility is an Excel workbook, you aren’t actually saving money. You are just paying the bill in a different way.
Most Managing Directors look at the price of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) as an additional cost. In reality, you are likely already paying that cost every single month. You just don’t see it on a line item in your accounts.
The admin drain on your best people
Think about your Production Planner or your Factory Manager. These are usually your most experienced, highest-paid employees. In a spreadsheet-led factory, they spend between 90 minutes and two hours every day simply updating data.
They are walking the floor to see which jobs are finished, chasing supervisors for timesheets, and manually typing numbers from paper job cards into a master sheet. If that person earns ÂŁ45,000 a year, you are paying roughly ÂŁ10,000 annually just for them to be a data entry clerk.
When your best technical minds are stuck behind a screen fixing broken formulas or re-keying data, they aren’t solving bottlenecks or improving process flow. That is a direct drain on your capacity.
The “Friday Afternoon” overtime trap
The biggest cost of spreadsheets is the lag. A spreadsheet is a snapshot of the past. By the time the Production Planner updates the schedule on Tuesday morning with Monday’s progress, the information is already twelve hours old.
This lack of live visibility creates a predictable cycle. On Wednesday, everything looks on track. On Thursday afternoon, a supervisor realises that Job 402 is actually two days behind because of a material delay or a broken tool that wasn’t logged.
Suddenly, you are in “firefighting” mode. You are paying time-and-a-half on Friday night and Saturday morning to hit a delivery date that was at risk three days ago. If you had seen that delay in real-time on Tuesday, you could have shifted the schedule or reallocated a machine without the premium labour cost. Overtime isn’t always a sign of a busy factory; often, it is just a symptom of late information.
The myth of the profitable job
In fabrication, CNC machining, or electronics assembly, margins are tight. Most MDs believe they know their most profitable lines. However, when you rely on manual spreadsheets, you are usually looking at “estimated vs. actual” costs based on best guesses.
Spreadsheets rarely capture the “lost time” accurately. They don’t account for the twenty minutes an operator spent looking for a fixture, or the hour a machine sat idle because the next job’s material wasn’t ready.
When you look at your spreadsheet at the end of the month, a job might show a healthy 20% margin. But if that job required three “quick” status meetings and two hours of unrecorded rework, it might actually be a loss-maker. Without live data capture from the shop floor, you are making strategic decisions based on incomplete evidence.
Why the problem gets worse as you grow
The “spreadsheet tax” does not stay flat; it scales. When you have ten machines, one person can just about keep a spreadsheet accurate. When you move to twenty machines or add a second shift, the complexity doesn’t double, it quadruples.
You start needing more “middle men” to pass information between the office and the floor. You find yourself considering hiring another coordinator or an assistant planner just to manage the paperwork. This is how SME manufacturers end up with bloated overheads without actually increasing their output. You are adding headcount to manage the chaos, rather than adding headcount to make more parts.
Moving from reactive to proactive
The goal of moving away from spreadsheets isn’t to have “fancy software.” It is to stop paying for the invisible costs of delays, admin, and guesswork.
When the shop floor has a direct way to log progress, the “hidden invoice” disappears. The planner stops chasing data and starts planning. The MD stops wondering if a job made money and starts knowing. The factory stops reacting to yesterday’s problems and starts preparing for tomorrow’s deliveries.
Stop paying the spreadsheet tax
If your shop floor is running on manual workbooks and paper job cards, you are already paying for the cost of an MES through lost time and eroded margins.
DynamxMFG is built specifically for SME manufacturers who need to get off spreadsheets and get back in control of their WIP. We provide the live visibility required to protect your margins and hit your delivery dates without the admin headache.
