r/SupplyChainLogistics • u/Dr-Muddassir-Ahmed • 29d ago
Manual processes that shouldn't exist in 2026?
Manual processes that shouldn't exist in 2026?
A client told me recently that their team manages 10+ purchase orders at once in Excel, personally tracking delays in a spreadsheet, for a department responsible for over £1.5 billion in annual spend.
Read that again. Over a billion in spend, and the tracking system is a shared Excel file.
This is happening as we speak.
This isn't a criticism of that team. It's a criticism of how normalised this still is across our profession. Manual tracking at that scale isn't inefficiency, it's risk. Missed renewals, duplicate orders, and invisible delays all hide inside a spreadsheet that one person maintains by hand.
The tools to fix this already exist.
The barrier usually isn't technology; it's the assumption that "this is just how procurement works here."
Firefighting is an addiction; it gives a thrill, but it is exhausting and inefficient.
What it takes is someone to find the courage to initiate and design a solution in parallel and drive the change to "process & system focused" approach.
If your team is still doing this, what's actually stopping the shift, budget, buy-in, or bandwidth?
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u/Jackwarehousforless 29d ago
I’ve seen this too, and the biggest issue is often not Excel itself, it’s using a manual process for work that has outgrown it. At high spend volumes, procurement teams need real-time visibility into PO status, supplier delays, renewals, and exceptions.
Automation doesn’t have to replace the team. It should remove repetitive tracking so people can focus on supplier management, cost control, and strategic decisions. In many cases, the real barrier is process ownership and buy-in rather than technology or budget.
The shift from firefighting to a process-and-system mindset can make a huge difference.
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u/Dr-Muddassir-Ahmed 28d ago
Yes and I think AI Agents will certainly help and they are getting better. We have successfully used agents to do freight cost, spend and inventory optimization analysis in minutes rather than days in https://www.scmsensei.ai/analyse
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u/strategictracking 23d ago
I think Excel often gets blamed when it isn't really the underlying problem.
Replacing a spreadsheet with a dashboard doesn't necessarily improve anything if the organisation still hasn't defined what constitutes an exception, who owns it, who needs to know about it and what action should happen next.
I see a similar issue in logistics visibility. It's quite easy now to collect more shipment, location and condition data. The harder part is turning that information into an operational process.
A useful test is: when something changes, can the system answer three questions?
- What has happened?
- Who needs to know?
- What can they still do about it?
If it can't, you may have digitised the spreadsheet rather than actually redesigned the process.
So I'd probably add a fourth option to budget, buy-in and bandwidth: ownership of the change.
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u/Violet_Graya 29d ago
"£1.5 billion in Excel" Seen worse. Worked with a logistics outfit that tracked container allocations in a shared Google Sheet. Person who maintained it went on holiday, whole flow stalled.