Let’s be honest about something: Excel is genuinely good. It’s flexible, it’s familiar, and for a manufacturer just getting started, it gets the job done. There’s no shame in building your first production tracker in a spreadsheet. Plenty of successful shops did exactly that. But there’s a version of that story where Excel stops being a tool and starts being the problem — and the tricky part is that the transition happens gradually. One more tab. One more formula. One more person who needs access to a file that was never designed for sharing. By the time most manufacturers realize