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Citation needed.
I think that "tens of millions of dollars" is not a good measure for potential savings. A more appropriate way to look at savings would be to consider the fraction of the total costs of the company.
Software consultants and vendors of enterprise resource planning software have been
plaguingadvising all kinds of businesses since the early 90s. I find it very unlikely that there is any sector which could save ten percents of its costs by just using Excel. Stuff like electronic inventory management or customer relations databases are standard for pretty much any business larger than a lemonade stand.The lowest-hanging fruits left are probably more on the order of 1% of the total costs, and I think that it is reasonable for companies to be wary there. Consultants have been known in the past to overpromise and underdeliver, and that shiny ERP solution which is supposed to take care of all of your software needs might end up being a software hellscape which requires an expensive specialist to run and only does half of what you want it to do.
I will grant you that in large organisations, departments often become fiefdoms whose bosses employ a lot of people simply to show how important their department is, not because they are needed. But for most organizations, these oversized departments came to be long after the invention of spreadsheet software, and at the core they are indicative of a political, not a technological problem.
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