Excel is a great tool. The trouble starts when you ask it to do everything at once: dashboard, planning, production history, quality tracking. Files multiply, so do versions, and the same figure gets keyed in several times before it reaches the report. This article looks at where spreadsheets hit their limits in an industrial setting, how widely business intelligence is really used in European companies, and how you can move to a single source of data without replacing everything.
11% versus 69%: a gap worth noticing
Eurostat tracks business software use every year in companies with 10 or more employees. In 2025, business intelligence (BI) showed the widest gap by company size: 11% of small enterprises (10 to 49 employees) used it, compared with 69% of large ones (250 or more), a 58-point difference. For ERP the gap was 48 points, from 41% to 89%.
Put simply, if you run an SME, chances are you run operations with whatever each person has to hand. And what they have to hand is usually an Excel file.
Excel isn’t the problem. The way it’s used sometimes is.
Spreadsheets have real strengths. They’re everywhere, your teams already know how to use them, and you can test an idea in ten minutes. For a one-off analysis, they’re hard to beat.
Problems start when the spreadsheet becomes the production system. Everyone on your team has their own file, everyone has their reasons, and none of the files talk to each other. The shift supervisor logs downtime, the lab keeps its results, finance tracks consumption. At the monthly review, the first half hour goes on agreeing which figures are right.
There are technical limits too, documented by Microsoft itself: an Excel worksheet holds at most 1,048,576 rows. A single sensor logged once a second fills one in just over twelve days. A plant has hundreds of them.
How do you know your spreadsheets have reached their limit?
You may recognise some of these situations. Several versions of the same file circulate by email and nobody knows which one is current. A figure such as a production quantity is entered on the shop floor, copied into a second file, then into the ERP. Reports arrive at the end of the week or month, too late to correct anything. And the person who wrote the macros is the only one who can maintain them.
None of these signs means you’ve got to throw everything out. They simply show that your data no longer has a single source.
One capture, as close to the machine as possible
You don’t need another tool on top. You need to capture the data once, as close to the equipment as possible, and let every use draw on it: dashboard, planning, history, quality control, reporting.
This is where automation comes in. Counters, run and stop times and weighbridge readings already exist in your PLCs and SCADA. An automation and industrial IT consultancy knows how to collect them directly, with no operator between the machine and the screen: signal inventory, PLC communication (OPC UA, for example), data consistency checks. The production management software, an MES, then takes over to format and share them.
What changes for your teams
The time saved on re-entry matters, of course. But what strikes our clients’ teams most is the first meeting where nobody argues about the figures any more. When the shop floor, the lab and management look at the same data, the discussion can finally be about decisions.
Excel doesn’t disappear. It stays useful for one-off analysis, fed by a reliable source rather than by copies.
How IBITEK supports the move
PILOT by IBITEK automatically brings together production, lab, downtime and truck flow data, and presents it as dashboards and reports.
IBITEK also handles the plant side: PLC connections, electrical works, programming and commissioning, with its electrical, automation and Industry 4.0 IT engineering teams. Founded in 2007, IBITEK has delivered more than 100 major projects across six EMEA countries.
Are you in the 11% or the other 89%? Let’s talk about how your data moves today.
