Panel-shop MES vs spreadsheets: when the spreadsheet stops working

Spreadsheets run more UK panel shops than any software product does, and for a while they run them well. This is about the point where they stop.

Short answer

A spreadsheet can hold a list of jobs. It cannot enforce that everyone works from the current drawing revision, hold an approval, prevent a stage closing without sign-off, or keep an audit trail of who did what and when. A panel-shop MES adds enforcement, shared live state and an evidence trail. The trade is flexibility: a spreadsheet will do anything you want, which is exactly why it cannot guarantee anything.

There is no shame in the spreadsheet. It is free, everybody can use it, and it was almost certainly built by someone who understood the shop better than any software vendor. Most shops should start there.

The failure is not gradual and it is rarely dramatic. It shows up as the same small events repeating: a job built to last month's list, a sign-off nobody can produce, a Monday morning spent asking four people where things are. Below is the honest version of when it is time, and when it is not.

What changes

	Spreadsheet	KonstanTrack
Current state of a job	Whatever the last person typed, if they remembered.	A by-product of the work being done and signed off.
Drawing revision	A column, unenforced.	Attached to the job; the floor sees the released revision.
Approvals	A cell someone types their initials into.	A hold point — the stage does not close without the sign-off.
Audit trail	None. Edits overwrite silently.	Who did what, when, retained against the job.
Multiple people at once	Conflicting copies, or one person owning the file.	One live record, role-based access.
Evidence at handover	Reconstructed from folders, inboxes and memory.	Already captured against the job as the build progressed.
Cost and flexibility	Free, and does literally anything you want.	Quote-based, and deliberately opinionated about the panel workflow.

The signals that you have outgrown it

Someone's job has quietly become 'keeping the tracker up to date'. That is an administrative cost you are already paying.
You have rebuilt a panel, or reworked one, because it was built to a superseded drawing.
A customer asked for evidence a check was done and it took more than an hour to answer.
Two people hold different views of the same job's status and both are looking at a file called Tracker_FINAL_v3.
Handover packs are assembled the week the panel ships, by someone hunting through inboxes.

A worked example: the Monday morning round

A production manager starts Monday by finding out where things are: a walk round the floor, three conversations, a look in two inboxes, then twenty minutes updating the tracker so the directors' meeting has something to look at.

None of that produced a panel. It reconstructed information that already existed in the building but was never captured anywhere shared. When status is a by-product of the work — a stage closed, an approval given, an inspection recorded — the round stops being necessary, and the meeting looks at the same screen as the floor.

Illustrative example based on common panel-shop practice — not a customer case study or a measured result.

When KonstanTrack is the wrong answer

You run a handful of jobs a month and one person genuinely holds the whole picture. The spreadsheet is winning; leave it alone.
Your bottleneck is engineering or procurement rather than shop-floor control. Software that tracks builds will not fix a design queue.
Nobody in the shop is prepared to change how they record work. An MES enforces a process, and enforcement without buy-in fails.

Limitations worth knowing

An MES will not fix a process nobody follows. If stages are not being signed off today, software will surface that rather than solve it.
You give up total flexibility. A spreadsheet bends to anything; a workflow system is opinionated on purpose, and that is the trade.
Somebody has to enter the job. The saving comes later, in what nobody has to chase.

Common questions

Can we keep using spreadsheets alongside KonstanTrack?

Most shops do for a while, and export is always available so your data stays yours. The gain only arrives when the job's live state lives in one place — two sources of truth is worse than one spreadsheet.

How long does it take to move off the spreadsheet?

Implementation starts with a workflow review, and setup is configured around the stages you already use rather than a generic template. We would rather run your first live jobs alongside you than hand over a login and leave.

Is a spreadsheet ever the right answer?

Yes — for a small shop with low job volume where one person genuinely holds the picture. The honest test is whether anyone is spending real hours reconstructing information that already exists in the building.

Work out which layer you are actually missing

Tell us what you run today and where the job status comes from. We will tell you straight whether KonstanTrack is the gap or not.

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Last reviewed: July 2026. Written and maintained by the KonstanTrack team.