Buried in many consulting groups is an analyst who has mastered the art of building spend cubes with spreadsheets, and has therefore become indispensable. It’s a waste of talent!

It never ceases to amaze us how many consulting groups depend on one or at most a handful of key analysts to produce the basic spend cubes required for opportunity assessment and sourcing. Even more surprising is that this essential work is still being done with a spreadsheet.

We like swinging a hammer as much as the next person, but if you’re installing a roof, a nail gun is a better choice. Building and mapping a spend cube is easy if you have the right tool — whether it’s ours or someone else’s, it beats hacking on a spreadsheet by a country mile. Anyone should be able to produce a useful spend cube in minutes, simply by answering a couple of questions and supplying some input data.

We get that a few analysts might be upset to learn that their spreadsheet magic can be mechanized — but they’ll change their minds in a hurry when they find out how much more productive they can be with the right tool set.

And when anyone in the company can produce a working spend cube, the consulting group isn’t faced with an existential crisis if the spreadsheet whiz kid goes missing.