A Parisian e-bike company was doing everything right. Good product, growing sales, solid brand. But their ops team was drowning in a single spreadsheet that sat between three different systems and needed manual updates every time a bike moved.
This is the story of that spreadsheet. And why killing it saved them more money than any marketing campaign they ran that year.
The problem
When I walked in, the ops lead showed me the spreadsheet. It had 47 columns and a tab per month. Every time inventory shifted, someone had to update the sheet by hand.
That someone was her. For about three hours a day.
What I actually built
The instinct when you see this is to replace the spreadsheet with a proper database. That instinct is often wrong.
The spreadsheet was not the bottleneck. The manual data entry was. So I kept the spreadsheet and built a pipeline that updated it automatically.
The lesson
When you see a human doing robot work, the robot is not always the answer. The pipeline to the robot is.