If I were to place an order for 1 million masks on your shopify store you would ship them the same day?
Spreadsheets seem backward to software people because we are confident with manipulating data with more flexible tools. We see them as backward primarily because they are batch-oriented and cannot easily handle distributed writes, elegant types, reflective programming, serialization, automated updates, etc.
However, consider a small to medium scale manufacturer. They have millions of dollars invested in equipment. They have dedicated employees who know that equipment, its settings, its maintenance, and its operation. To those employees, software is a sideshow.
Chances are, for any given manufacturing order there is going to be the following: pricing the order, sending out a quote, taking a downpayment, allotting or acquiring the raw materials, preprocessing, temporary storage of parts, scheduling the machine and operator time against other orders for all unit operations necessary, post-processing, final assembly or QA, consolidating and packaging, actual shipping, settlement.
Can you see how batch-oriented processing actually makes reasonable sense for this sort of scenario? Going real time is quaint but if it doesn't buy you anything and you need to hire "$oftwar€-d€v$" to create and maintain interfaces that still require human input and have less familiarity to your very-busy-operators than a simple spreadsheet - why not use a spreadsheet? It's cheaper, faster, more familiar (read: less errors, ~no training required) and therefore from a business standpoint more effective.
If at some point the manufacturer gets big enough to outgrow spreadsheets, there are plenty of well established upgrade paths.
To clarify, my problem isn't with spreadsheets as a tool in general: my problem is that spreadsheets are powerful enough to do this particular job even for larger factories, but not powerful enough to do it without quickly becoming 10,000 layers of accreted, fossilized spaghetti. If the process is illegible to everyone who manages the factory, using the spreadsheet is akin to divination by tea leaves: dump your numbers into the sheet and hope that you can interpret the right action from it.
Restated: it seems to me that spreadsheets are often taken well-past their limits as an effective tool in the management of factories, and nobody seems to notice that its happening until its too late.
And yes, we could ship 1mm easily. We have shipped 10MM in one day. The issue would be booking the LTL (1mm is only about half a truck) which would take several days to arrange right now.
But they would be pallet wrapped and labeled that day.