A Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet from Hell Slowed Williams' F1 Cars for Years

I used it most when you did. I found it acceptable, but not stellar. I never heard of it losing data. Most of the issues were with people not adapting to it and trying to make it work like the in-house tool it replaced (which was buggy, slow, and did lose data regularly).

But yes, a lot of people didn't like it and just updated it from their separate spreadsheets or whatever on a weekly or monthly basis depending on when reports were generated.

Nope, everyone these days wants to use Jira or Gitlab or something so that's what I use. I'm back to an IC role (and have been for a while) and am trying to stay out of project management in general. I hated the politics of it all.

My first instinct reading that question was a StackOverflow like "why would you do that ? do Y instead" type answer.

I've used MS Project more than a decade ago for one or two project and just gave up to do what the sister comments are describing: manage the project elsewhere, with JIRA tickets, one or two gantt charts and some more excel sheets as needed.

I never had data loss or straight bugs, it just didn't feel more useful than any of the other tools it's supposed to replace.

Project status was always more complex than what could be fed into it, so I had to keep track of it elsewhere anyway.

Task status needed deeper integration with github and other tools, we're writing tickets and epics etc. anyway so JIRA projects were better suited.

Then it lacked enough simplicity and flexibility to be used as an adhoc gantt tool.

The whole concept just feels doomed in my eyes when it comes to software projects.

Because you can either do it with excel spreadsheets or insanely expensive PDM/ERP software like SAP which is insanely expensive to setup and anyone who has ever used it will tell you is terrible. There used to be middle road options like netsuite but they were bought by SAP. There are alsoneays to do it in Catia, etc like the airplane folks do, but that's also insanely expensive.

People are now using airtable to do it

Mapping physical actions (parts consumption and receiving) to digital transactions requires both tech and human behavior. Usually the behavior is the bottleneck because it's a lot easier to just take a part off the shelf than it is to create a work order, define a BoM, and post a transaction to the ledgers. At places like this -- the craftsman/engineers are usually the guys with authority -- not the process guys. So they grab a part off the shelf, and try to play catch-up in Excel later.

To add to the other replies here.

From my perspective and experience, the actual reality of manufacturing anything complex does not match up with the set of rules that has to constrain any given ERP platform to be a useful, data-based record. Allow too much freeform data, and start losing more and more analysis ability. Too strict, and you quickly crash against the fuzziness of reality.

All the while requiring that your data be as close to 100% accurate as possible. That's the crux of the problem. Modern, complex engineering/manufacturing requires a level of traceability that cannot be handwaved away.

Now contend with this problem against a bill of materials tens of thousands of lines long with nearly a million discrete items put in, all with their necessary interdependecies recorded.

Now do this across an entire product line.

https://michelbaudin.com/2018/08/01/the-bom-rap/#more-126364...

^ A good read on the complexity of BOMs and why managing them can be tricky.

>My hypothesis is that this is because manufacturing is currently modeled as a list of deterministic steps in a table instead of as a stochastic set of nodes and edges.

YES. Someone else who understands!

I will take a look, as very few people (even experienced manufacturing engineers of the highest pedigree and skill) seem to grasp this intuition.

I like https://www.redmine.org/. It’s stable, contains all features I expect from issue tracking, fast, easy to export and configure. And if you must, very easy to go into the code or database and change.

I agree that CRDT spreadsheets like Google Sheets have similar features, but we only got those recently as well.

If you know, you know. =)