Case Study
Why Spreadsheets Don't Scale - Process and Application Modernization for an Animal Feed & Pet Food Manufacturer
Client challenge
A mid-sized U.S. manufacturer and distributor serving the animal feed and pet food industries relied on more than forty spreadsheets to handle its costing and margin management processes. Over time, the workflow became increasingly complex, involving multiple data sources, manual updates, complex calculations, and business rules that often existed only in the minds of those responsible for managing it. As a result, maintaining consistent data and calculations across spreadsheets required significant manual coordination and made the process difficult to maintain and hand off thereby limiting the company’s ability to expand operations given the person-dependent knowledge and manual work required to function. The client needed a more reliable way to manage the process, centralize business rules, and ensure that information remained consistent from one step to the next.
Our approach
Captios Partners analyzed the existing workflow to understand its data sources, business rules, calculations, required outputs, and integration needs. Rather than rebuilding the spreadsheets as web pages, we designed a centralized application around the underlying workflow, with business rules, data governance, and validation built in. The application integrates with the client's existing Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) ERP system, reducing the need for manual data re-entry between systems. With AI changing how software is built, Captios leveraged its AI-assisted, proprietary tools to deliver the application in a mere two months, allowing the team to devote more time to business architecture design and user acceptance testing (UAT). This ensured the business was supported at a detailed level and maintained momentum through the build phase.
Client outcome
The application is designed to replace the client's fragmented spreadsheet-based process with a single, centralized system featuring defined team roles, consistent calculations, data governance, traceability, and change logging. By bringing business rules and calculations into one application, it reduces the need for manual work and makes critical business knowledge less dependent on specific individuals. When requirements change, the team can update the application instead of adding another tab or formula. This gives the client a more maintainable foundation for costing and margin management as the business grows. Over the next few months, the teams are excited to see the application’s positive effect on processing time, error rates, and operational efficiency as they move onto the next data initiative of tying data together.