Over the years our team of BESTMIX consultants has encountered many different approaches to formulation when visiting companies all around the world. Before deciding on the BESTMIX software some were using in-house developed solutions, free basic software, outdated solutions, ... Another commonly used solution however, is Excel (or other basic spreadsheet software).

While spreadsheet software is a great and flexible solution for many business challenges it may be difficult to use in a professional formulation department. Because of this we've used our experience and put together an overview of the pro's and con's about using spreadsheets software in your formulation process.

The pro's of using Excel during your formulation process

1. Cheapest solution to help you formulate
2. Easy to use and a short learning curve
3. Very user-friendly because you can tweak it just the way you want it

The con's of using Excel during your formulation process

1. Requires a lot of manual work, both in managing ingredients and formulas, but also in documentation such as reports, tags or product specifications
2. Managing data is pretty easy, but using specialised functions such as equations and optimisation requires a more in-depth knowledge
3. Difficult to use in a team (no audit trail, or user-rights, hard with multiple users in a single spreadsheet, ...)
4. Security set-up not under control by the formulation department
5. You can't update multiple formulas or ingredients at once
6. Difficult to enforce a "central" location where all relevant information can be found
7. No (automated) integration from external sources
8. Excel can't cope with advanced calculations of a high number of formulas and raw materials

Excel or specialised solutions - What's right for me?

Although Excel has a number of clear disadvantages we don't necessarily advice against it. Depending on the size of your formulation department and your specific needs this may actually be the best fit for your business. At Adifo we use a rule of thumb to determine whether or not a prospect is actually in need of a specialised solution like BESTMIX and whether we will be able to offer a large enough impact and acceptable ROI. The rule is the following:

Number of formulas * Number of different raw materials = 500 < X

As long as the result is under 500 we believe it's manageable in Excel as long as you don't try to regularly update the quality of your raw materials.

If you want to learn more about how a specialised version can add value to your formulation department be sure to check out this webinar.