Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20k car parts

I'm surprised this is reaching mainstream news now. It was known for a long time, before Vowles joined Williams, that it was in the shit, underfunded and that they were using Excel files sent via email attachments, instead of a proper ERP system.

It's not surprising this happens actually, when as a F1 team principal, your goal and job security is tied to scoring points at this year's season, not setting up a multi-year plan to update your IT infrastructure and processes, because if you don't score enough points, you might not be around next year to see your grand plan bear fruit. And if you're like Williams, failing, underfunded and replace your TP every year, who's only there as a scapegoat, no wonder nothing ever improves.

It basically the trap of perverse incentives and very low job security. F1 shareholders won't care that you replaced Excel with an efficient ERP system, If you don't score any points on the track, you're out.

Anyway, they're not alone. People would be surprised how many well respected and profitable companies still run like this.

But F1 is special here. Adrian Newey, the genius race car designer and head of aerodynamics at Red Bull only uses a drafting board for design, never CAD, or any computers actually, to the point his secretary prints his emails and CAE simulations for him on paper[1] and works on those, to the point he is surrounded by mountains of paper. The tech community would be livid to see this.

[1] https://youtu.be/PNuQMmnTpoo?si=58yMTzNB9a815FoM&t=115

> and that they were using Excel files sent via email attachments

That hurt to read. Not even the whole "cloud collaboration-enabled" Google Sheets/Microsoft365 excel?

Wait until he hears about banks and the cursed things they build on top of excel

modern day horror show

The worst I saw was a network hardware and service provider maintaining all their products and services in Excel spreadsheets per contract. Each of those had all the relevant information, the list of products, when they were due for renewal, service, or replacement, and the agreed-upon rates.

I was there to get them off that system doing ETL to Oracle, which was only the first part of getting it to SAP. It was interesting to see all the diverse and creative ways that the structure and formatting of these contract spreadsheets diverged. The worst was encoding crucial information in colors or other styles of the cells. That required automation from both outside and inside the spreadsheet, as well as develop a full library of heuristics to determine which strategy to use to visually parse the sheets. Looking back, I don't even know how this wasn't a multi-year project and it got done (at least the pre-SAP parts) on-time. Even then, half the work was still on the Oracle side once the data was there but barely normalized (what's less than 0NF?).