Joël Collin-Demers says that running your Procurement Department on Excel, which was not designed to support business processes, is like asking a straw bridge to support an elephant. (Original LinkedIn Post)

His point being that Excel should only be used for its intended use: ad-hoc spreadsheet-based analysis.

While I applaud his goal, as we need to stop running the business world on Excel (especially since over 90% of spreadsheets have significant errors and these errors will cost you billions), Joel doesn’t understand just how strong well engineered straw bridges can be.

Engineering Students in the classroom have built (13g) straw bridges from 0.4 gram straws, using trusses and lots of triangular bracing, that can support over 4 kg! (Video)

Now, of course, this is for stationary weight, and Procurement, like Supply Chains, has moving parts, but engineering students have demonstrated that Howe bridge designs, made from a roughly 2kg PASCO model bridge set, can minimize the compression force to 5.7N! (1N = force required to accelerate 1kg at 1m/s)

And it’s very likely that even stronger bridges will be built out of straw in the future.

This means that if we consider that a plastic straw has a compressive strength exceeding 20 MPa (2 N/m^2 * 10^6) and a surface area of approx 24π cm^2, that tells us that we likely haven’t reached the limit yet (which would be about 20 N).

In other words, his comparison, meant to move Procurement off Excel, actually illustrates why Procurement won’t abandon Excel. While seriously flawed as a Procurement tool, continual bursts of innovative creativity allow Excel to continue supporting the ridiculous weight being thrust upon it. It might be built from straws in the application world, but, as we just demonstrated, properly arranged, straws can be unbelievably strong.

Remember that the next time you are arguing against Excel.