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.
The difference with Adrian Newey is that whatever he’s doing works, and the rest of the org is using all the high tech aerodynamic modeling. Red Bull is so far ahead (largely due to Aero) that it’s boring to watch.
But it’s not like the excel sheets are giving Williams an edge.
My understanding is that they were tracking significantly fewer parts in Excel as many of what they are now tracking as separate parts were previously tracked as a single part (kind of an assembly). I think they were previously tracking somewhere in the 100-200 parts in Excel.
My understanding for why this is coming out now is that there was a talk Vowles has done recently where he mentioned the massive hit getting ready for this season because they changed both Excel into the new ERP systems AND started tracking each individual part, which complicated the transition and why it was such a rush for Williams to be ready for this year.
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?).
Trojan gift horse for undermining the competition .. once they're hip deep and headed deeper into Access dependancy you're free to play the field without concern of them catching up.
In 20 years I've encountered precisely one Access Database that was very well designed, adequately documented, and implemented correctly - meaning people used a single instance on a specific machine, or Remote Desktop Protocol'd into same.
Connecting to an Access database over a network from individual client apps is a recipe for pain as the database file gets locked, so then people start saving "copy of copy of copy USE THIS ONE" versions and you get divergent database backends with no clean way to merge. IME this always happens for business critical Access systems with no backup and documentation at the least convenient time, and suddenly it's IT's problem/fault. Yes you can connect to a SQL Server backend, but then it's IT's problem/fault/responsibility to maintain, and it takes Access out of the "simple enough for business users" domain.
That said, as a rapid app development desktop tool Access can work very well if you know its limitations. It's somewhat surprising MS never made a 365 web-first equivalent, but that's probably because they'd rather charge for Dynamics 365 licenses and Azure SQL hosting.
Access is great for small companies if it's schema'd properly. The problem is when those small companies outgrow it; it's a complete rewrite. I believe you can point it to a MSSQL backend, but it's been a couple decades since I've used it.
You're not wrong... I used it for some small business things before I started programming. But why does MS have to treat so disrespectfully? Like they didn't even have time to give the SQL editor a monospace font, wtf?
DBeaver has an Excel-ish interface for SQL. The usual rows and columns layout, you can double click a cell to edit it.
You do have to Save to flush the changes to the DB though, and the errors when queries are wrong or whatever are hard to read. Your users will likely be totally unable to grok the errors. I work in IT and it's somewhat difficult for me because of the chain of error handlers (SQL -> Java error type -> Java error -> display to user; there's a lot of Java stuff mixed into your SQL errors).
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] threadIt'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
That hurt to read. Not even the whole "cloud collaboration-enabled" Google Sheets/Microsoft365 excel?
But it’s not like the excel sheets are giving Williams an edge.
My understanding for why this is coming out now is that there was a talk Vowles has done recently where he mentioned the massive hit getting ready for this season because they changed both Excel into the new ERP systems AND started tracking each individual part, which complicated the transition and why it was such a rush for Williams to be ready for this year.
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?).
From frying pan to fire.
+7 years ago, heard JPM had +20k of those on their networks. I just shiver thinking about that.
Connecting to an Access database over a network from individual client apps is a recipe for pain as the database file gets locked, so then people start saving "copy of copy of copy USE THIS ONE" versions and you get divergent database backends with no clean way to merge. IME this always happens for business critical Access systems with no backup and documentation at the least convenient time, and suddenly it's IT's problem/fault. Yes you can connect to a SQL Server backend, but then it's IT's problem/fault/responsibility to maintain, and it takes Access out of the "simple enough for business users" domain.
That said, as a rapid app development desktop tool Access can work very well if you know its limitations. It's somewhat surprising MS never made a 365 web-first equivalent, but that's probably because they'd rather charge for Dynamics 365 licenses and Azure SQL hosting.
It's certainly a step up from Excel.
Can you recommend any actual, better alternatives?
You do have to Save to flush the changes to the DB though, and the errors when queries are wrong or whatever are hard to read. Your users will likely be totally unable to grok the errors. I work in IT and it's somewhat difficult for me because of the chain of error handlers (SQL -> Java error type -> Java error -> display to user; there's a lot of Java stuff mixed into your SQL errors).
F1 - World where IT isn't allowed !
Just only MS IT...
On the other hand Excel looks like quite stable piece of software - more then 1 milion of rows... (\s & ^\s)