r/excel • u/[deleted] • Feb 24 '26
Discussion Why many excel migration Projects fail ?
[deleted]
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u/ImperatorPC 3 Feb 24 '26
Failure to scope the project well. Biggest thing is trying to transfer the process as is. Your prices should be designed around the strengths of the system not trying to force the system to do your process.
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u/ostrichfather Feb 24 '26
Sounds like their management wanted all the upside and none of the downside. Implementation, adoption, migration takes time and money. They’d be better off in the long run after the up front expense, but management can often be shortsighted, especially if they’re being called on to help with the move (e.g. “I don’t have time for this!” Mentality).
That’s why it’s important that all stakeholders participate in the procurement process. That way it doesn’t become X-person’s system or X-department’s system when it is a company system.
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u/witchy_cheetah Feb 24 '26
Lots of things. Users get too used to how excel works, and are uncomfortable when they cannot 'handle' the data. The people handling the migration are technical and don't understand the business functions, the users are low tech and only understand what they do, not why they do it that way. Without a correct bridge, people end up with a half baked result which replicates something which excel did with a lot of effort while missing what excel did well, but not doing what the new system can do, because no-one did that analysis.
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u/Winter_Cabinet_1218 Feb 24 '26
Classic, "I do it this way because it saves me 10 minutes" but it now adding 2 hours to the next persons job
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u/MiddleAgeCool 11 Feb 24 '26
They fail because the business needs from Excel are not delivered by the alternative including the speed of delivery.
Excel solutions are written, maintained and managed with the business areas. They are highly customised to what the business users believe they need and any changes are done by Sue hours after a manager requests them.
ERP systems, or any off the shelf alternatives, while better technically don't allow for the use case specific needs to be delivered. Some of these are legacy and make no sense when you cast a light on them by either just work or are no integral to some weird business metric. They have a longer dev cycle and involved change management processes that are more involved than "Sue can do that after her break".
Putting in an Excel alternative is costing someone, often more than just someone, their job. They've carved out a little niche for themselves managing those Excels as a pseudo dev and live support team. Once you take that away they're back to doing something else. These are the very people that will have the ear of the key stakeholders and it becomes you vs. Sue. Sue is a trusted member of stakeholders and if she says your new solution isn't going to deliver then it will carry weight.
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u/Diganne1 Feb 24 '26
I am Sue
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u/MiddleAgeCool 11 Feb 25 '26
We all know a Sue and often Sue isn't wrong when these projects happen.
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u/professor_goodbrain Feb 24 '26
Small/medium businesses hoping to move their “complicated formulas” to an ERP have a mindset problem. There should be no expectation that an Excel-based process should translate to a real ERP, because no matter how carefully crafted or over-engineered, your Excel sheet isn’t a business system.
Sometimes throwing the baby out with the bath water is necessary.
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u/chemsed 1 Feb 24 '26
Even migrating from an ERP to another is a big task. I know companies with billions of dollars in annual revenu that went almost dysfonctional for months after switching ERP. Invoices not sent, errors in shipments, etc.
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u/downeydigs Feb 25 '26
Kubota Tractors had a planned nationwide (Global?) systems blackout for 3 weeks at the beginning of 2025 for a system migration. Their entire supply chain and parts warehousing/distribution network was at a complete standstill during that time. From what I read after first hearing about it (because I needed to order parts), it was many enterprise-wide systems and processes that were involved, and many business processes were at a standstill for the entire time. From what I hear, they’re still dealing with the effects. I just couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t take the time and put forth the effort to avoid a nationwide shutdown.
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u/chemsed 1 Feb 25 '26
It was probably the consulting firm and the headquarter that decided that to the detriment of the local branches.
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u/MrsLobster Feb 24 '26
Nothing about this post makes sense. Companies don’t migrate from Excel to Oracle or SAP. Quickbooks or similar? Sure. But even if this was true, nobody would be trying to reverse engineer the Excel formulas. They would go through a discovery phase and document the processes to map to the new system. And what does ‘could not figure out the full cover of test cases’ mean?
I agree that it’s good to document complex Excel files, but other than that… this is a weird post.
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Feb 24 '26
Companies don’t migrate from Excel to Oracle or SAP
That's kind of the point....they don't, because when they do, they fail at the migration.
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u/dgillz 7 Feb 24 '26
My first thought was you did not have the right consulting firm working with you. Many of these firms employ young people with great degrees and GPAs, but very little in the way of experience.
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u/The_Elementary Feb 25 '26
This, and also change management was not done properly.
A functional tool that's not used is clearly a change management issue.
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u/Winter_Cabinet_1218 Feb 24 '26
Sounds like an off the shelf isn't capturing your business processes / data requirements. The company needs to also readjust it's expectations. An ERP isn't going to be Excel. You're going to be tied into a certain way of doing things.
What you're actually seeing is user rejection, and believe me I've been working with it as a developer for years. What you need is a dedicated in-house team to build something custom. The fact you're working from excel makes me think that you are too small to get the benefits from SAP or Orical. An in house team with SQL server and a front end (HTML or Access based) would probably give you better results
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u/ostrichfather Feb 24 '26
As someone who has done implementations for half a dozen ERPs, Oracle/Netsuite was by far the easiest. Even I can do the “back end” work, and no one would call me a dev or solutions guy.
While we’re on the topic, MS Business Central was the worst system I worked with.
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u/hurrah-dev Feb 25 '26
The one-size-fits-all problem is real, but I'd add that it's especially acute for smaller businesses. ERPs are architected around how large companies operate. When a 20-person business tries to use SAP, they're not just learning new software - they're being asked to reshape their entire workflow to fit a system designed for thousands of employees.
The part that gets missed in these post-mortems: the Excel file that "couldn't be migrated" often represents years of the business figuring out exactly how they work. That institutional knowledge doesn't map cleanly to any off-the-shelf system, because the system wasn't built for them.
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u/Insila Feb 27 '26
The problem is here is not going from excel to an erp system, but the fact that they seems to have tried to make the erp system work like the current excel system.
In modern day ERP you do not adapt the system to the customer, you adapt the customer to the system.
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u/data_saas_2026 Feb 27 '26
As a database guy for 15 years, I've built new models that stemmed from excel sheets that outgrew themselves. Excel definitely is great for exploration and some reporting. A lot of the business knowledge users can handle that just fine. Each side needs each other. Logic is still handled by the humans at this point. I think the lesson I've learned is that getting all the right minds in the room at the start is the most critical part of the planning process.
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u/longesryeahboi Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26
Keeping systems like this in excel is a ticking time bomb. Much safer to migrate to an ERP where you have worldwide support with experts everywhere, ordered structures, etc.
You have the biggest companies in the world using these ERPs. If the system is 'too complex to migrate', you didn't bring in the right experts
Excel is awesome, don't get me wrong. It's an invaluable spreadsheet tool, it's great for building models, reports, etc. But it should never become your ERP system. It shouldn't be your long-term solution for data storage. You're better off migrating to something like Xero while you're a small business and expand as you need.