From Excel chaos to digital transparency – when homemade solutions reach their limits

Risk 1: Dependence on individuals

Often, there is exactly one person responsible for managing macros, formulas, and analyses. As soon as this person is unavailable—due to vacation, illness, or retirement—a real problem arises..

In the case of one client, this employee was already retired but still employed for a few hours a month to maintain the system.

This is exactly the point at which we are often called in: when it becomes clear that sustainable transparency cannot be achieved without a professional solution—and companies risk falling behind in the competition as a result.

Risk 2: Incorrect analyses and poor decision-making

Equally critical is the quality of the data. Homemade solutions often provide incomplete or simply incorrect information—and analyses based on this inevitably lead to wrong decisions.

In all projects where we replaced a homemade solution, it became clear afterwards that the cycle times of many products deviated by up to 30% from reality. This alone leads to significant inaccuracies in the analyses.

Additionally, without machine integration, plausibility checks, or support functions, operators often only enter the times that justify a shift’s production target. How reliable the documented downtime and its causes are then depends heavily on the individual employee.

This results in analyses that may seem plausible at first glance but are actually far off—creating a fatal basis for investment or process decisions..

The move to a Professional Solution

Our answer is a MES or PDA solution from COSMINO. This replaces isolated solutions with a robust and future-proof platform—transparent, auditable, and with clear authorization concepts.

The benefits our customers gain are clear:

• Reliable transparency: Decisions are based on facts, not gut feeling
• Up to 75% less effort for manual data entry and corrections
• Focus on improvements: Valid data shows where continuous improvement is worthwhile
• 10–20% efficiency gains are realistic—this is consistently observed in our projects
• Future-proof: Our solutions are continuously developed and improved

The experience gained from homemade solutions provides a valuable foundation—data acquisition guidelines, master data, and reporting requirements can be carried over. Teams will also perceive the new solution as a noticeable relief and experience its benefits quickly.