‘Excel and Jim’ are not an MES Strategy

ReadFun Yet InformativeIndustry Insights
Written By Jeff Winter

Original Publication April 14th, 2025. Updated January 28th, 2026

Walk through a plant with cutting-edge equipment and you’ll see plenty of evidence that manufacturing has become technologically sophisticated: automated cells, high-speed packaging lines, vision systems, and sensors everywhere. What you will also see, usually within minutes, is the parallel system that actually coordinates much of the work: clipboards, printed travelers, handwritten checklists, and a spreadsheet that “everyone knows” is the one that matters.

This isn’t a quirky detail of shop-floor culture. It is a structural contradiction that sits at the center of productivity, quality, and resilience. Manufacturing has spent decades modernizing the physical layer, meaning machines, automation, throughput, while leaving the execution layer (the system that records, verifies, and communicates what is happening in real time) startlingly manual.

The result is that many factories look digitally mature until you ask a simple question: where does operational truth live today, and how quickly can you trust it? If the answer is “in someone’s notebook” or “in Excel, once it gets updated,” then the factory is running on a fragile form of coordination, no matter how advanced the equipment might be.

What the Data Says (and Why It Should Make You Uncomfortable)

The persistence of paper is not an anecdote. It’s measurable.

According to iBase‑t’s 2022 Digital Manufacturing Productivity Report, they estimated that 95% of surveyed manufacturers still use paper-based processes, and 27% use paper for more than half of all activities. The same release notes that 98% still use manual spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, even while taking steps toward digital transformation, and it provides methodological context: 403 manufacturers across the US and UK participated, spanning sectors such as aerospace and defense, medical device, industrial equipment, electronics, and shipbuilding.

If that sounds like “the past,” the more recent MES lens suggests it is still very much the present.

In December 2025, IoT Analytics published an analysis tied to its MES Market Report 2025 to 2031 stating that 54% of small and medium-sized plants use some combination of pen and paper or spreadsheets as their manufacturing execution system (MES). In the same piece, IoT Analytics also estimates that 54% of plants globally in 2024 managed manufacturing operations using these manual methods, effectively treating clipboards and spreadsheets as the default system of record.

Taken together, these numbers point to something bigger than slow software adoption. They suggest that a huge share of manufacturing is still operating with an execution model designed for a different era, one in which complexity was lower, traceability expectations were softer, and the cost of delayed information was less punitive.

Why Paper, Spreadsheets, and “Jim” Keep Winning

Paper and Excel persist for reasons that are rational in the short term. They are flexible, familiar, and fast to deploy. When a process changes midweek, paper doesn’t require a ticket. When a customer asks for a special label, Excel doesn’t need a steering committee. When a system is too rigid, people improvise, and production continues.

The problem is that this flexibility comes with hidden costs that compound over time. Manual execution doesn’t just slow things down. It changes how organizations behave. It trains teams to manage by exception, to normalize heroics, and to accept that real operational visibility is something you assemble later rather than something you possess in the moment.

Here is what the clipboard economy quietly taxes, often without showing up cleanly on a budget line:

  • Latency masquerading as control: When information is written down and transcribed later, decisions are almost always made with partial truth. You can still run, but you are constantly running slightly behind reality.

  • Version control as a cultural norm: Spreadsheets rarely fail dramatically. They fail subtly, through copies, local edits, and “the real file” living on one person’s desktop. The organization adapts by relying on people, not process.

  • Risk concentrated in tribal knowledge: Every plant has a “Jim,” the person who knows which workaround works, which spreadsheet matters, and which step can be skipped “because we’ve always done it that way.” When operational continuity depends on a few individuals, resilience becomes a staffing issue.

  • Compliance and traceability becoming episodic projects: In regulated environments, evidence should be a byproduct of execution. In paper-heavy environments, evidence becomes something you reconstruct under pressure, which increases cost, stress, and audit risk.

  • Improvement constrained by invisibility: Continuous improvement needs consistent data. If the shop floor produces narratives rather than structured, time-aligned records, improvement becomes slower, more political, and harder to sustain.

This is the moment where many teams say, “We don’t need MES, we’ve got Excel and Jim.” And to be fair, Excel and Jim often do get things done. But that is precisely the warning sign: a factory should not need heroics to be predictable. Heroics are proof that the system is asking people to carry complexity that the process should be carrying.

The Better Question: Are You Scaling Output, or Scaling Truth?

MES is sometimes framed as “more software,” which is why it gets evaluated like a discretionary IT purchase. In practice, a well-implemented MES is an operating upgrade. It makes execution observable, traceable, and actionable while work is happening, not after the shift ends. It reduces the distance between reality and decision-making, and it turns improvements into something you can standardize rather than something you can only achieve when the right person is present.

If you want a more thought-provoking way to assess your readiness, consider asking questions that cut through the software debate:

  • If a customer called right now, could you trace a batch end-to-end quickly without a frantic search for binders and spreadsheets?

  • Do supervisors and leaders see issues as they emerge, or do they learn about them once scrap and rework make them undeniable?

  • Are performance conversations grounded in real-time facts, or in end-of-week reconciliation?

  • What happens when the factory’s “Jim” takes a new job, retires, or simply burns out?

For many manufacturers, the first step does not need to be a “big bang” replacement of everything. The most effective modernization programs often begin where the risk or value is highest, then expand once trust and adoption are established. Common starting points include:

  • Genealogy and traceability (especially where audits, safety, or customer requirements drive urgency)

  • Digital work instructions and operator guidance (to reduce variability and rework while improving training speed)

  • Real-time downtime and OEE fundamentals (to shrink decision cycles and make losses visible)

  • Quality events and deviation workflows (so exceptions are captured, routed, and resolved systematically)

The goal is not “going digital” for its own sake. The goal is building factories where operational truth is shared, current, and dependable, so the organization can improve continuously without depending on heroic effort.

In other words: we can do better, and the statistics suggest we have to. When the dominant execution system is still paper and Excel, it becomes difficult to argue that the next wave of operational AI, digital twins, and adaptive manufacturing will be anything more than a glossy layer placed on top of an unstable foundation.

References

Jeff Winter
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