Sometimes what was meant as a quick fix ends up growing into a hungry monster. The trouble is, the bigger it grows, the harder it is to walk away. Each workaround you add makes it more capable, more embedded in your process, and the ‘proper’ solution feels increasingly out of reach. But at what cost?

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A few years ago I was working with a startup in a newly regulated industry. We had a strict requirement to report our inventory - raw ingredients, bulk intermediates, and final product - to a goverment department every month.

The reporting requirements could actually get quite complicated - it was a 40 page guide that was written by people who had obviously never worked in a production environment before - the categories did not align with our own tracking and left many gray areas for interpretation.

At first reporting was relatively easy - we just needed to track a few inputs and outputs and translate them into the reportable categories. As we were a startup we were super busy, learning as we go, constantly putting out fires. So I just banged together a spreadsheet that quickly solved my problem. “This’ll do for the first few months of production - we’ll have proper software tracking this soon enough” I thought.

As production ramped up, things got busier and the reporting requirements got more complicated. If anything my team and I had less time every month, so we’d just quickly add another inventory category, another mass balance to the spreadsheet, a few more translations for reporting. A year later the spreadsheet spanned multiple pages, and now tracking yields and waste product for different production processes, even calculating the number of milligrams of active ingredient stored on our premises for the tax department.

Inventory day was hell. Like doing your taxes every month, and if your numbers didn’t balance or match the last month then the government website would reject your report.

We wrote checks and balances everywhere, but because we were duplicating and then modifying the spreadsheet each month, inevitably errors would creep in. Best case scenario the balances would catch the error and we fixed it on the fly. Worse, you found an error in a formula that goes back several months, requiring you to request changes to reported values.

Too many changes to previous reports and you risked triggering an audit, taking days of time and effort.

Over time we built a monster of a spreadsheet, and it grew every month.

This isn’t the only example of a ‘quick fix’ that grew into a production monster. I’ve seen multiple businesses whose operations or compliance relied on something that was never intended as the final solution, but over time became a critical linchpin. Up until a few years ago there was a government department whose entire budget planning depended on modifying a spiderweb of fragile, interconnected spreadsheets that I bet grew just like this.

Chances are, you've experienced something similar.

Don’t worry, there are some easy fixes to help tame the monster, but first you need to stop feeding it.

I wrote a guide that describes six practical transformations that cut hidden errors, boost data integrity, and reduce risk. You can get it for free here:

​https://daily.haiqu.ca/csrr​

Yes, it takes time and a bit of effort. If you don’t have time then get help. But either way, stop feeding the monster.

Until next time,

– Brendan

p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website.