Forest Palmer, managing director of Cognos in Asia, says that using Excel lets customers address the inevitable diversity that exists within a large firm. "By introducing the Excel add-in, staff in different business units can take our centralized planning model and customize it to a much greater degree to fit their own particular operating environment," he says.

Russell Pennington, vice president of planning and budgeting at Trinsic, a US$251 million-a-year telco in the United States, is a fan of the Excel/Cognos link-up. "When your employees — including the CEO — can easily perform sophisticated analysis, modeling, and planning without having to know anything other than Excel, that completely changes the game of true, enterprise-wide planning," he enthuses.

Giving Excel Wings
Zarina Peperdi, vice-president of finance and human resources for SIA Cargo, a S$2.5 billion-a-year (US$1.5 billion) subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, is another convert. For years, she and her team used Excel to carry out profitability analysis on her company's 80 international cargo routes. It was a gargantuan task. Every cost item, from fuel burned, to landing and parking fees at different airports, to the cost of depreciation and operating licenses for aircraft had to be broken down for each route and matched against revenues.

But just as many other companies have found, Peperdi grew increasingly frustrated with the shortfalls of Excel. "We were having difficulty keeping track of who was making changes, when, and to what," she recalls, not to mention questions of data security, and issues of users over-personalizing their spreadsheets.

To help improve the process, Peperdi installed a BPM solution from SRC Software and went live with it in early 2004. One of her chief criteria in choosing a BPM solution was Excel compatibility, and in SRC, Peperdi found what she needed.

Indeed, ever since being launched in the United States 20 years ago, SRC Software products have always used Excel as their user interface, with the software primarily acting as the rules and logic that connect the spreadsheet front-end to a back-end database, usually from Oracle or Microsoft's SQL Server.

Tom Malone, CEO of SRC Software, says his company was often derided in the past as being merely "Excel on steroids." But now, with BPM vendors tripping over themselves to boost their Excel credentials, he feels it's he who is having the last laugh. "Within five years, all performance management software will have Excel as its primary user interface," he predicts.

For Peperdi, having a BPM package based around Excel has brought numerous benefits. There is the high level of flexibility, for one. "We need a lot of scope to run what-if scenarios, to compare different time periods, and to slice and dice our data," she says.

Peperdi also values the ease of installing and using the new system. "People are very familiar with Excel. It took almost no training to install the software because everybody knew it already," she notes.

As one commentator puts it: "In the past, the CFO of a company was often also the CEO — the Chief Excel Officer. Now it looks set to stay that way."

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