[ Blog ]Why Excel Isn’t Enough Anymore to Manage Margins
Cementing Profitability: Smarter Business with Performance Management
A Blog Series by Ramy Sedra
Are you still using spreadsheets to track material costs, margins, and plant performance?
You're not alone—but it’s costing you more than you might realize.
Spreadsheets were never designed to manage the complexity of modern ready-mix operations. Static rows and columns can't keep up with real-time price fluctuations, production variances, or shifting demand patterns across multiple plants.
👉 According to a study by the University of Hawaii, 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. In an industry with razor-thin margins, even a small mistake in mix cost or volume forecast can erase profitability.
👉 How quickly can you identify a plant that’s underperforming? Or a mix design that’s bleeding margin? If the answer is anything longer than “immediately,” you’re leaving money on the table.Many of us turn to spreadsheets as a handy and cost-effective tool to manage all kinds of ad hoc business problems. Its ease of use, flexibility, and low barrier to entry make it an attractive tool. However, most of us have faced the reality of our simple spreadsheets spiraling out of control and becoming difficult to maintain e.g., broken links, stale data, formula errors – you get the drift. So, it’s a great tool but it shouldn’t be the only one in your toolkit!
Performance management software offers a different approach—one that gives producers:
- Real-time margin analysis at the mix, plant, and customer level
- Alerts when costs deviate from targets
- Predictive insights into profitability leaks before they hit the bottom line
Performance management systems differ from spreadsheets in a few fundamental ways:
- They integrate the data for you – so no broken links and time wasted updating data
- Bridging finance and operations – integrating data from operation and financial sources so you can see cause and effect relationships
- Forecasting vs historical views – shifting your focus to forecasts give you the ability to adjust your behaviour to correct or maximize the outcomes for your business
- Time to value (speed) - they refresh data in near-real-time and operate at the speed of your business vs the weekly, monthly (or longer) cycles of spreadsheet update cycles
- Leverage AI and advanced analytics – they tap into capabilities that drive a level of precision and automation that most of us can’t build into our spreadsheets
So, if you’re managing by spreadsheet and you’re in a ready-mix business that’s competitive, growing, under pressure, or focused on optimizing operations, I’d encourage you to ask yourself a few questions. Do you feel like you’re driving by just looking in the rearview mirror? Do you want to shift from reactive to proactive decision-making? Ask yourself if Excel is still helping you—or holding you back?
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to publish a series of blogs that are aimed at helping ready-mix producers think about how they can be more data driven. Below are the topics that I’m going to cover. If you’d like me to answer other questions about getting the most from your data, please reach out.
- How to manage performance in your ERP or CRM?
- Can you see your true cost drivers in real time?
- Are Finance, Ops, Sales — all speaking different languages?
- What is reactive decision-making costing you?
- Are you manually tracking compliance?
- Do you know your most profitable customer or job?
- As your business scales, does your reporting keep up?
- What if your reports told you what to do next?
- Are your assets working for you—or against you?
- How do you calculate the ROI of being data driven?
In the meantime, I hope this helps to get your juices flowing.
At C60, we offer a solution to these challenges and more. The C60 Opportunity Platform provides a holistic understanding of a company's operations, presenting actionable insights for decision-making. With our software, producers can identify opportunities in dollar terms and make data-driven decisions. Contact us today! Email sales@c60.ai or call +1 (760) 219-8718 or 1 (514) 909-9231.
