You are Camila Ferreyra-Ocampo, lead analyst on the sales and operations planning (S&OP) team at Helio Verde Beverages. The master sales workbook, much of which you built yourself, has just taken six minutes to open, and the chief financial officer is on the phone with one question: what, exactly, is slowing it down? Whatever you name is what the company will spend on first.
The situation
Helio Verde, the soft-drinks division of a consumer-goods group, has about €380 million in revenue and serves some 14,000 retail accounts, from supermarket chains to neighbourhood shops: about 4 million order lines a year. The S&OP team keeps the trailing four months, about 1.4 million lines, in a single workbook shared through SharePoint, with 12 analysts working in it at once. Because a sheet stops at 1,048,576 rows, the file is split across sheets stitched together with lookups. From it come promotion returns, volume forecasts and the CFO's explanations whenever a quarter misses plan.
Last week a memo from the S&OP director leaked with the figures: the file takes 6 min 12 s to open on the 16-gigabyte laptops and 9 min 40 s on the 8-gigabyte ones. A conditional sum across the whole file takes 38 seconds the first time and 11 on recalculation; a pivot table, 70 seconds to refresh. And it crashes about twice a week, usually in the afternoon, when all twelve have it open.
The CFO, Inés Garrido-Lobos, will not sign the second-quarter board pack until someone can defend its numbers, and the board meets on April 23 to decide whether to leave the spreadsheet. An external database architect will mark every answer you give. IT is waiting to hear what to buy.