Meet Dave. He runs Dave’s Corks, a cork manufacturing and distribution company that’s been growing steadily for years. There’s just one problem: the entire business lives in spreadsheets.
Production counts in one tab. Inventory in another. Orders in a third, updated by hand, emailed around, and copy-pasted into yet another sheet for shipping. Somebody always has “the real version.” Somebody always finds out too late that they didn’t.
It’s not that Dave’s team is careless. Spreadsheets are genuinely great for financial modeling and number crunching. They just were never built to run a manufacturing floor, manage live inventory across warehouses, or track an order from raw material to shipped pallet. When you use a spreadsheet as an operational database, you get what Dave has: duplicate data entry, version confusion, and nobody fully trusting the numbers.
This is the exact spot where custom software earns its keep. A connected web application pulls production, inventory, and order data into one system everyone works from in real time — no more “which version is current,” no more re-typing the same order three times, no more scrambling because the one person who understood the color-coding is out sick.
Dave’s Corks is a composite story, but the pattern is real. We’ve watched this exact scenario play out across manufacturing and distribution companies for decades. If any part of it sounds familiar, it’s worth a conversation.
Book a 20-minute call with our CEO, Lance Keene: https://keenesystems.com/booklance
