The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was “a joke,” Vowles recently told The Race. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.” This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless,” Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. “And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.”
Does F1 not have access to database technology?
-–
Edit
For some reason I started to wonder if HyperCard (for Macs) which came out 35+ years ago could even be used to make a database for the records that was simple to update and easy to understand.
Excel is fine for warehousing, but it’s not super easy to navigate without tons of way too complex macros and you can’t have multiple edit sessions on one file.
I’d just use like a Postgres instance with something like Metabase for active tracking of part status with some basic CRUD scripts set up to buttons on dashboards for each car section or something.
Maybe a Wekan or something for active tracking of part production and general activity stuff.
Williams was the worst team on the grid for quite a few years. They’re still not very good, but they have at least one very good driver and James Vowles, who was the Chief Strategist at Mercedes, just took over the Team Principal role last season. He’s done a lot to right the ship, and I imagine that fixing things like this were a pretty crucial part of it.
Williams has existed for like 50 years, I guarantee it’s done this way because some old guy used to do it this way and just handed the Excel sheet down to the next person.
Does F1 not have access to database technology?
-–
Edit
For some reason I started to wonder if HyperCard (for Macs) which came out 35+ years ago could even be used to make a database for the records that was simple to update and easy to understand.
Clearly the actual problem is insufficient excel mastery.
It’s called building real tools that can export excel.
Excel is fine for warehousing, but it’s not super easy to navigate without tons of way too complex macros and you can’t have multiple edit sessions on one file.
I’d just use like a Postgres instance with something like Metabase for active tracking of part status with some basic CRUD scripts set up to buttons on dashboards for each car section or something.
Maybe a Wekan or something for active tracking of part production and general activity stuff.
I’m of the mind that if the thing you’re doing is too large or complicated to use Excel, then it doesn’t need doing.
Too many parts and systems in your car for excel to be navigable? Car needs fewer parts and systems.
Too many guys in your military to fit on an excel sheet? Your military needs to be smaller.
Excel has a limit of 1,048,576 rows while the army has “1,073,200 total uniformed personnel” according to Wikipedia, time to start decimating.
I’m sure you can just consolidate all the people called Mike into a single guy with the “Duplicate Entry” function.
this is why there were centurions
Yet you comment here.
Do you mean to tell me there’s a way to post here other than using an excel script?
Nvim is always an option
What to you mean, excel is a database.
-Public Health England in 2020
Williams was the worst team on the grid for quite a few years. They’re still not very good, but they have at least one very good driver and James Vowles, who was the Chief Strategist at Mercedes, just took over the Team Principal role last season. He’s done a lot to right the ship, and I imagine that fixing things like this were a pretty crucial part of it.
Counterpoint: he decided Logan Sargeant deserved another season.
Only guess there is that maybe he thought an American driver would lead to American sponsors?
Williams has existed for like 50 years, I guarantee it’s done this way because some old guy used to do it this way and just handed the Excel sheet down to the next person.