Regarding discussions on use of Excel for Compliance work

San Jose, CA, Feb 12, ‘09- At the recent IPC green conference in San Jose, a speaker made comments on the use of Microsoft Excel for product compliance related work. The remarks were then offered for comments to a panel, but there was not a full discussion by the panel on all of the facts to date. This news article discusses the topic in more detail.

A fact of life is that Excel is almost everywhere in the enterprise and almost everyone knows how to use various features in it. It is thus an excellent platform for managing data. As a fact, compliance work involves huge amounts of data and also demands integrity of data. While an individual person may or may not be able to, by himself or herself, use all of the features of Excel in an efficient manner, there are certainly companies that offer third party solutions that use features of Excel to bring economic, efficient and exact solutions to the market. This is not only in the compliance area, but also in the financial area. In the compliance area, Papros Inc. offered the first free Excel-platform based tool for REACH pre-registration, while Cefic, in combination with IBM also offered an Excel based free pre-registration tool. The Worl Resources Institute (WRI) offers GHG computation tools in Excel. These tools were well received and well utilized by the industry. In passing, it must be noted that Cognos, which is part of IBM had brought solutions to the desktop and offered a platform using Excel. There are undoubtedly, more examples, in these and other areas, of third party solutions. All of these products, use the efficient features of Excel in a manner that guarantees data integrity. Thus the appropriate comment based on full evaluation of facts on the use of Excel in compliance work is that, when used properly or within the context of leading third party solutions, it does offer an economic, proper and good platform for doing compliance work for small, medium or large companies, as some of these tools are indeed highly scalable.

Disclosure: These opinions are mine, and not necessarily those of my employer.
Microsoft Excel is the trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

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