The Spreadsheet Graveyard
A true story about a 220-person food manufacturer, 47 quality tracking spreadsheets, significant annual spend on shadow systems, and the day they discovered they'd already paid for everything.
The Red Alert
Meet the operations manager. Her inbox is chaos. Forty-seven Excel spreadsheets track quality control, each one owned by a different person. Nobody knows which version is current. The production planner has built a separate Excel empire: 12 files, because the MRP module was "too complicated" to learn. Month-end in Finance isn't a process—it's a nightmare. A single master spreadsheet, three days of reconciliation, one person who knows the formula, zero backup.
• 47 quality tracking spreadsheets
• 12 production scheduling Excel files
• Standalone CRM: [monthly licence cost]
• Third-party WMS: [monthly licence cost]
• Manual month-end reporting: 3 days of labour
The total cost? Significant annual spend on third-party licences alone. But that's just what they could count. The real cost includes 2,400 hours of manual labour, data inconsistencies that slip through quality checks, production delays because spreadsheets can't integrate with each other, and spreadsheet logic that nobody fully understands anymore.
Then the letter arrives from the SYSPRO reseller: "You currently have 420 operators on file. Under the Named Subscription model, you'll need a licence for each. The projected annual cost is significantly higher than what you're paying today."
Current annual spend versus the new quote? A massive increase. Panic ensues.
The Orange Shovel
linqIQ arrives to do a forensic audit. The excavation reveals two stories hidden beneath 420 user accounts.
Only 195 operators are genuinely needed. Of the remaining 225:
• 67 ex-employees (left but never deactivated)
• 43 duplicates (same person with multiple accounts)
• 37 seasonal workers with permanent accounts
• 38 robot/integration accounts (not people)
But the second story is more shocking. The audit of SYSPRO module usage shows they're using only 7 of 48 available modules. The other 41 modules? Sitting dormant, already included in their subscription. And those dormant modules include every single thing they're paying external vendors to do.
Dormant modules they already own:
• Quality Management Module
• MRP/MPS (Material Requirements Planning)
• WIP Tracking (Work In Progress)
• Contact Management
• Warehouse Management (WHM)
• Embedded Analytics & Reporting
• And 35 others...
They've been paying SYSPRO for a Ferrari. And they've been driving it like a bicycle. More accurately, they've been walking alongside the car and paying Uber to get places.
The Cyan Blueprint
linqIQ produces the Shadow System Displacement Map. Every spreadsheet empire, every standalone licence, every manual process is now mapped to its SYSPRO module equivalent. The numbers stare back from the screen.
Real-time quality tracking, automated incident alerts, full audit trail.
Automated production scheduling, demand integration, real-time optimisation.
Integrated with sales orders, single source of truth, no monthly cost.
Native integration, real-time inventory, barcode automation included.
The Displacement Calculator
Enter your own costs to estimate your potential savings from adopting built-in SYSPRO modules.
The Green Dawn
Six months of implementation. The result: 195 Named Users (not 420) activated, at a cost-per-user appropriate for their band. Against the original inflated quote for 420 users, the rationalised user count alone delivered massive savings.
Original quote: 420 users — massively inflated
Actual need: 195 users — right-sized through audit
Immediate saving: significant — just from user rationalisation
But that's not the real story.
The real story unfolds across the business:
The standalone CRM? Terminated. The WMS vendor? Contract ended. Those other point solutions? Gone. Real, recurring savings that show up in every monthly P&L.
Month-end now runs in 6 hours instead of 3 days. Quality checks are real-time, not spreadsheet reviews. Production scheduling runs automatically. That's not just efficiency—that's strategic time returned to the operations team to actually manage the business instead of feeding spreadsheets.
The Quality Management module flags anomalies instantly. The old spreadsheet review process? Incidents were caught a week later. Now they're caught before they reach packaging.
The net impact: slightly higher ERP cost per user. Massively lower total cost of operations. The spreadsheet graveyard is buried for good.
The operations manager, looking at the new dashboard, says: "We had all this capability the whole time. We just didn't know where to look."
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The Graveyard Counter
From The Field
Right Partner. Right Data. Right Deal.
Be Better.
Understanding Your Pricing
SYSPRO Named Subscription Pricing
SYSPRO Named User pricing varies based on your organisation's size, module requirements, and regional factors. Pricing is typically structured in volume bands — the more users you have, the lower your per-user cost.
The key insight from this story isn't the rate card — it's that most organisations are paying for far more users than they actually need. A forensic audit reveals your true user count, which determines which pricing band you fall into.
Contact your SYSPRO partner for a quote tailored to your environment, or request a free linqIQ audit to establish your actual user count first.