re: Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts

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Mine?!

No sir. My work is not littered with errors.

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Would you be willing to bet money that no one could find a single error in your Excel work?

Is all user input sanitized?

Do your formulas/macros/scripts/code handle edge cases?

Do you have a test framework to ensure that given sets of inputs match the resulting outputs? Is that even possible to automate or must it be done manually periodically?

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This is very clean data that has gone through a big 4 audit.

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Did they use Excel to generate and clean it?

If users are not generating and editing data, then you are using Excel essentially for presenting data which is a good fit for spreadsheets. Not so much an application as a data viewer. This is not so bad.

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That said, there are much better products out there for inventory management, and since it’s F1, I’m sure they don’t mind spending the money.

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F1 has a budget cap meant to help smaller teams like Williams but it actually hurts them in a lot of ways because the big teams like Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes have huge amounts of equipment and resources that were paid for in years prior to the caps. Williams has very likely avoided spending money on what some might have considered unnecessary spending which has resulted in the issues at hand.

James Vowles who just took over as the team principal of Williams Racing came from Mercedes-AMG Petronas where they likely had custom-designed software for inventory management. When you go from the penthouse to the outhouse even if you have perfectly good Charmin somewhere on the campus (if you can find it) you are still going to miss the Toto bidet you had in your private WC.



ETA I wonder of anyone will notice what I did up there.

Eh. To be fair excel is likely played a role for a vast majority of the worlds innovation (gotta be in the trillion $) and offers a powerful platform with low barrier to entry. Literally people can just learn excel and improve their livelihood substantially.

Without knowing details on the issues you mentioned, I would imagine it’s a user error vs an actual program issue. It’s a tool to capture information, perform calculations, and ultimately drive decisions. User error is not software error (the gun didn’t pull its own trigger).

I suspect a lot of effort in removing excel is to allow businesses to hire dumber people at a lower cost with a safeguard keep the company out of the ditch. It can also hide some of the steps from any employee wanting to actually learn and branch out on their own.

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ETA I wonder of anyone will notice what I did up there.

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I seent it