Guide
Why your current approach is hitting a wall—and what to do about it
Recognize the warning signs that spreadsheets are costing you credibility, know what infrastructure makes value delivery scale, and build the case for change with your leadership.
Every value engineering team starts with spreadsheets. They're flexible, familiar, and free. But somewhere between 10 and 100 business cases, spreadsheets stop being an asset and start being a liability.
This guide exists because the transition from spreadsheets to scalable infrastructure is one of the most important—and most poorly understood—evolutions a value practice can make. You'll learn to recognize when you've hit the wall, what capabilities you need to scale, and how to build the internal case for change.
Spreadsheets hit a ceiling not because they're bad tools, but because they're the wrong tool for organizational-scale value delivery. The symptoms show up gradually:
Version Chaos: Multiple versions of the same model floating around, no clarity on which is current, changes lost in email threads.
Quality Variance: Output quality depends entirely on who built the model. Your best people produce great work; everyone else produces risk.
Knowledge Silos: Critical logic lives in individual files and individual heads. When people leave, capability leaves with them.
Audit Anxiety: When finance asks how you calculated something, you have to hope the person who built it is available and remembers.
Scaling Pain: Every new deal requires building from scratch. Your capacity is capped by your headcount.
The costs of spreadsheet dependence are real but often invisible:
Rework Costs: How many hours per week does your team spend rebuilding models that already exist somewhere?
Error Costs: How many deals have been affected by calculation errors, wrong versions, or stale data?
Opportunity Costs: How many more deals could you support if you weren't spending time on rework?
Credibility Costs: How often does inconsistency between models undermine your authority with customers or internal stakeholders?
People Costs: How much faster would you onboard new team members if they had structured tools instead of a folder of spreadsheets?
Quantify these costs. You'll need them to build your business case.
Scalable value delivery infrastructure has five core capabilities:
Centralized Model Management: One source of truth for model logic, templates, and components. Changes propagate automatically.
Structured Data Layer: Customer inputs, assumptions, and benchmarks stored and versioned separately from model logic.
Workflow Orchestration: Clear processes for creation, review, approval, and delivery. Automated where possible.
Analytics and Insights: Visibility into what's being built, what's working, and where quality varies.
Integration Readiness: Ability to connect with CRM, CPQ, and other systems in your revenue tech stack.
You don't need all of this at once. But you need a path to all of it.
You have three options for moving beyond spreadsheets:
Enhance: Add governance layers to your existing spreadsheets—version control, review processes, template libraries. Low investment, limited upside.
Build: Create custom tooling tailored to your exact workflow. High control, high ongoing cost.
Buy: Adopt purpose-built value engineering software. Faster to deploy, but requires adaptation to the tool's model.
The right choice depends on your scale, budget, and strategic importance of value engineering. Most organizations underestimate the true cost of building and overestimate their ability to enhance their way to scale.
Ironically, getting budget for better value engineering tools requires a strong business case. Here's how to build it:
Quantify Current State: Measure time spent on rework, version management, and manual processes. Survey your team.
Project Future State: Based on the capabilities you'd gain, estimate productivity improvements and error reduction.
Identify Champions: Find leaders who've felt the pain of spreadsheet limitations—usually finance, ops, or deal desk.
Start Small: Propose a pilot with a specific team or use case. Prove value before asking for enterprise commitment.
Connect to Strategy: Link your request to company priorities like sales productivity, customer experience, or operational excellence.
Moving from spreadsheets to scalable infrastructure is a journey, not an event. A realistic roadmap:
Phase 1 (Months 1-2): Inventory current state. Document all models, templates, and processes. Identify what to keep, what to rebuild, what to retire.
Phase 2 (Months 2-4): Select and configure your platform. Migrate core templates. Train initial users.
Phase 3 (Months 4-6): Expand adoption. Build additional templates. Integrate with other systems.
Phase 4 (Months 6-12): Optimize and scale. Add advanced capabilities. Measure and report on value delivered.
Plan for resistance. Some team members love their spreadsheets. Change management matters as much as technology selection.
Warning signs that indicate spreadsheet-based value delivery has reached its limits.
Core capabilities required for organizational-scale value delivery.
Decision framework for choosing how to move beyond spreadsheet-based value delivery.
Assess your current state against the Spreadsheet Ceiling symptoms
Quantify the true cost of your current approach using the cost categories provided
Evaluate your needs against the Five Capabilities framework
Use the Build vs. Buy framework to determine your path forward
Build your internal business case using the guidance provided
Plan your transition using the phased roadmap as a template
Download the PDF version to reference offline or share with your team.
Download PDF VersionSee the operational drag that's slowing your deals—before it shows up in your pipeline. You'll quantify the rework you didn't know was happening, recognize how version sprawl erodes trust with finance, and build the case for governance that actually sticks.
Diagnose where your value practice actually sits—and what it takes to level up. You'll benchmark against the four maturity stages, see exactly what separates leaders from laggards, and understand the platform capabilities that turn value into compounding advantage.
Stop rebuilding business cases from scratch every deal. You'll get a repeatable framework for structuring value models, clarity on which driver categories actually move decisions, and a workflow your whole team can follow—so quality stops depending on who builds the model.