Strategic Management Tool – Excel vs PlanPro

For decades, Excel has been a daily tool for many organizations in managing various internal processes. It is certainly a suitable starting point for strategic planning. However, as organizations grow and requirements become more complex, Excel’s limitations can begin to hinder strategic planning, tracking goal execution, and effective management—especially in larger organizations and those with more complex business processes.

In this blog post, we will briefly highlight the limitations of Excel as a strategic management tool and showcase the advantages of specialized management software like PlanPro. Additionally, using the example of North Estonia Medical Centre, we will illustrate how the adoption of PlanPro has reduced administrative workload and increased transparency.

Key Limitations of Using Excel as a Management Tool

1. Fragmented Information and Lack of Transparency
   When an organization’s strategic goals, action plans, and tasks are stored in separate files, it becomes difficult to get a comprehensive overview and establish connections. Information managed in Excel tends to be organized by processes or departments, which reduces overall transparency.
2. Challenges in Strategy Management and Monitoring
   Linking strategic goals, activities, and action plans in Excel is quite troublesome. Additionally, Excel does not support the creation of different views, tracking progress, or managing key performance indicators (KPIs).
3. Limited Support for Team Collaboration
   Excel is an excellent tool for individual work. However, essential team collaboration functions—such as real-time updates, version control, and simultaneous editing by multiple users—are difficult, if not impossible, to implement in Excel.
4. Risk of Errors and Time-Consuming Reporting
   Information managed in Excel is often stored in separate files, making it time-consuming to compile a complete overview. Reporting responsibilities often fall on a single individual, who must manually collect data from across the organization. This process involves significant time spent on communication, data retrieval, consolidation, updating, and validation. Manual data entry and copying increase the risk of errors. Additionally, when information is shared via email, multiple versions can emerge, leading to version control issues.

Advantages of PlanPro Management Software Over Excel

1. Comprehensive Overview
   PlanPro consolidates strategic goals, action plans, tasks, and projects into a single information system. In addition, it facilitates personnel evaluation, risk management, time planning, actual work time tracking, individual goal setting, performance management, budget planning, and monitoring of budget execution. This ensures a holistic and up-to-date overview of the organization with enhanced transparency. Both management and teams can configure personalized dashboards as needed. The system displays interrelationships and allows for the creation of both individual and general overviews. Visualization tools, such as Gantt charts and board views, help quickly grasp the progress of activities.
2. Support for Team Collaboration
   PlanPro enables real-time collaboration, allowing teams to work simultaneously and make transparent modifications. Workflows are easy to manage, and project progress can be tracked via an activity log and change history, ensuring all participants stay informed about project developments. The project workflow can be tracked in the activity log, and the change history can be viewed, ensuring that all participants are up to date with the project’s activities. Different user groups can have customized permissions, and the system provides email notifications for users related to specific tasks. The system allows email notifications to users associated with the activities. 
3. Execution of Strategic Objectives
   With PlanPro, organizations can establish links between strategic objectives, action plans, and tasks. This is particularly valuable for large teams and cross-departmental collaboration, preventing duplication of efforts and inefficiencies. PlanPro also enables individual goal setting and results management, as well as the management of metrics and progress tracking at different levels. PlanPro also enables individual goal setting and results management, as well as the management of metrics and progress tracking at different levels. This ensures that the entire organization moves towards a common goal.
4. Reports
   PlanPro allows users to generate reports with up-to-date information and various parameters at the click of a button. This saves time and minimizes the risk of errors. If necessary, reports can also be exported to Excel.

Case Study: Practical Benefits of PlanPro at the North Estonia Medical Centre

The North Estonia Medical Centre, with approximately 5,000 employees, shares its practical experience in implementing PlanPro software. The North Estonia Medical Centre uses PlanPro as an information system for various processes, including:

• Managing and monitoring work plans necessary for achieving strategic goals.
• Overseeing different projects, tasks, and action plans.
• Conducting annual employee reviews.

PlanPro enables the North Estonia Medical Centre to keep all activity-related information in one place, making it easier to maintain continuity and reducing administrative workload. For example, if a project remains unfinished in one year, it can be seamlessly carried over to the next year’s plans without the risk of losing or overlooking important information.

Transition from Excel to PlanPro

Previously, the North Estonia Medical Centre relied on complex Excel spreadsheets, which were time-consuming to manage. Copying projects and synchronizing data into new annual plans required extensive manual work, often resulting in duplication and information loss. The adoption of PlanPro has effectively eliminated this issue.

„PlanPro has enabled us to accomplish tasks that would have been very challenging or even impossible with Microsoft Office tools. Previously, we managed our strategic plans and annual action plans using Excel files. Since Excel files don’t synchronize, there was always duplication and information loss. Starting a new year required manually copying information from one place to another. Determining how each year’s projects contributed to our strategic goals was a massive task that could take me an entire month. Today, this process takes me less than a week.“ describes Priit Tohver, head of the North Estonia Medical Centre’s sustainable development service. There is also no need to constantly bother unit managers about data, as all the necessary information is transparent and available to everyone via PlanPro.

PlanPro is not just a tool, but a complete information system that makes daily work smoother, more accurate and less stressful.

Read the full case study here.

The experience of the North Estonia Medical Centre shows how PlanPro can help organizations reduce the administrative burden and increase transparency.

PlanPro – a Comprehensive Strategic Management Tool

Excel can be helpful in managing an organization’s internal processes up to a certain point, but as the organization grows, limitations often arise, such as data fragmentation, duplication, incomplete information flow between teams, and the complexity of manual tasks (for example, coordination and report generation).

PlanPro management software helps overcome these bottlenecks by making the management of the internal processes within the organization significantly simpler and clearer.

The implementation of PlanPro software enables a comprehensive, interconnected, and up-to-date overview of all strategic activities and supports the involvement of the entire organization in strategy execution.

If you are looking for the right software to take your strategic planning and execution to a new level, be sure to ask for PlanPro software demo.