The Case For Outsourced Excel Support

By Author: Lucy Carter
Total Articles: 102
Comment this article

If you work in an office, you probably use Microsoft Excel. Excel has been the world's most popular spreadsheet package since 1993, and is now estimated to have a 90% share of the market. If a business needs to use numbers, it will have employees using Excel on a daily basis.

Excel has become ubiquitous because it can be learned on-the-job, with a bit of knowledge sharing between colleagues. It is also extremely reliable and a single spreadsheet can be left to underpin the measurement of many a business process.

The problem is that Excel becomes part of the furniture and starts to get used inefficiently. Before you know it, a secretary is spending half their working life performing mundane data entry tasks that could easily be automated. Alternatively, the same secretary may attempt to increase their productivity with Excel, but get stuck.

In an ideal world, every company would employ an on-call Excel expert to help improve the company's use of the software. In fact, they would have to employ at least two to cover vacations, sickness and, if you operate across timezones, work different shifts.

How ...
... much would that cost? Well, unfortunately you're not just looking for technicians, but specialists who can instantly grasp any aspect of your business. These skills are highly prized and the majority of such workers prefer to go freelance. In a worst case scenario, you might even find your employed Excel guru resigning to contract himself back to your workforce.

Realistically, you're looking at $200k minimum for a two person in-house Excel desk once all overheads are considered. That's an unrealistic figure to find for all but the larger corporations.

A very small team may struggle to cope with changes in workflow so is inherently inefficient or, alternatively, failing to provide a truly on-call consulting service. The point is that a helpdesk is "demand led"; with the great irony that an over-stretched helpdesk gets unused because employees don't trust it to deliver.

The only sensible solution is to have a larger team of Excel specialists at your disposal and not have to pay the overheads associated with redundant time. Effectively, to tap an external Excel support desk as and when required.

Of course, "external consultants" have a bad reputation for charging $300/hr and delivering precisely nothing. That's because "management consultants" are merely there to provide a fresh set of eyes and do not possess any skills that are not already present in your office. Therefore it is impossible for their help to pay for itself. Whereas Excel consultants have technical skills that can save measurable quantities of time and money.

So, in conclusion, companies should attempt to optimise their use of Excel but can only do this in a cost effective manner by using a helpdesk manned by true experts in the field.

Ed Bolton
Founder of Excel4Business
www.excel4business.com
Ed Bolton is the founder of Excel4Business, providers of Excel Support.