Every factory has limited space

Every factory has limited space, and in most of them nobody can say with confidence how it is used three weeks from now. Machines have maintenance systems, people have shift plans, materials have an ERP — but the floor space every job physically occupies is typically planned in a spreadsheet, maintained by one person, on top of their actual job. This article is about why that is the normal case, where exactly the spreadsheet breaks, and what a tool would have to do to replace it.

The starting position, in numbers

The gap is measurable, not anecdotal:

• 76% of European SMEs operate at a low or very low level of digital intensity — 42% at very low (Eurostat, 2024).
• 54% of factories worldwide still managed manufacturing operations with pen, paper and spreadsheets in 2024 (IoT Analytics, 2025).
• Even among small and mid-sized manufacturers actively shopping for software — a group already primed to change — 23% plan in spreadsheets and another 25% by manual methods (Capterra, 2026).

So if your plant’s spatial plan is an Excel file with a tab per hall, color codes documented nowhere, and your initials in half the cells: that is not backwardness. It is the industry median. The question is only whether it still fits your size.

Space is a consumed resource without a system of record

A job does not only need machine hours, people and material. It needs somewhere to be: a bay for the weldment waiting on inspection, a hall section for a three-week assembly, a paint booth slot, staging area before shipping. Space is consumed by work exactly the way machine hours are consumed — with one operational difference: a double-booked machine shows up in a planning system before it happens; a double-booked bay shows up as two crates and an argument, after the material is already on the truck.

The result lands on one person. Usually not someone titled “capacity planner” — a production manager or workshop lead who took the planning on because somebody had to. When a delivery date slips, the schedule is the first place everyone looks, and the person behind it feels that look. Worth stating plainly: that stress is structural, not personal. Maintaining a multi-dimensional constraint problem by hand in a general-purpose grid is hard, and the failure modes below are properties of the tool, not of the planner.

Where the spreadsheet is right — and where it breaks

Excel wins for rational reasons: zero procurement, arbitrary structure (no vendor data model survives first contact with a real floor), legible to everyone, working within an afternoon. For one hall, one planner and a workload that fits in one head, it is genuinely adequate.

It stops being adequate in a predictable order:

1. Version drift. Server copy, emailed copy, printout on the shop-floor wall — three versions, each true to someone. There is no single current plan.
2. No conflict model. The sheet stores what you type. That two jobs occupy the same square meters in the same week is a fact about the world, not about the cells — nothing flags it. Collisions surface physically, at the most expensive possible moment.
3. Coupled dimensions, uncoupled tool. Time, space and crew are one linked problem. Move a job by a week and its floor area, its people and its follow-on jobs all move — the grid shows none of it. The planner recomputes every consequence mentally, on every change.
4. No aggregate view. Add a second hall or a second site and “what does next month look like?” costs an afternoon of reconciliation. Idle areas and chronically overloaded ones are equally invisible — and both cost money.
5. Bus factor of one. Structure, color codes and exceptions live in one head. Vacation is a risk; handover is a project.

Why “get a real system” fails the mid-sized shop

The standard advice collapses on contact with the numbers.

ERP/MRP suites are sized for a different class of buyer. In Panorama Consulting’s 2024 study, the median enterprise software project cost $450,000 and ran 15.5 months — and the surveyed organizations had a median annual revenue around $200 million with roughly 750 employees (Panorama Consulting Group, 2024). Adoption data shows the same boundary from the other side: 89% of large EU enterprises run an ERP; only 41% of small ones do (Eurostat, 2026). For most small manufacturers the standard answer is not late — it was never on the table. And even where an ERP exists, it models bills of material, routings and work centers, not “which area of Hall 2 is free in week 34 and does it have a crane”. Plants that run an ERP often plan the floor next to it, in the same sheet.

Generic cheap tools — project boards, team calendars, room booking — model the wrong primitives. A Kanban card occupies no square meters. A room booking has no crew, no crane requirement, no follow-on job waiting for the bay. Forcing a shop floor into a task tracker reproduces the spreadsheet’s blind spots with a nicer interface.

That is the gap: too big for the sheet, too small for an ERP program. Excel is not chosen there. It is what remains.

Requirements for a replacement

Stated as requirements rather than features, anything that replaces the sheet must:

1. Model space as a first-class resource — floor areas with size, properties and location (ideally on the actual floorplan), scheduled with the same mechanics as people and equipment, because jobs consume all three at once.
2. Detect conflicts continuously, not only at placement. Plans drift: absences appear, jobs overrun, a second booking lands on the same area. Violations must surface when the plan changes, not when the crates meet.
3. Expose utilization so that under-used and overloaded areas are visible on one screen instead of reconstructed from memory.
4. Fit the operation’s scale: days to adopt, not quarters; priced for a workshop; simple enough that the sheet’s current owner migrates without a consultant.

The fourth requirement explains why the gap persists — building for enterprises that can pay, or building generic tools for everyone, is easier than building for the middle.

Where Orkyo fits

Orkyo is being built against exactly these four requirements: one plan for jobs, spaces, people and tools; spaces as real areas on your floorplan; continuous conflict detection; utilization visible per site and per area.

It is pre-launch, and honest about it. There is a live demo to evaluate in a few minutes, early access for a small number of design partners, and an open-source Community Edition to self-host. If you own one of these spreadsheets, you are who it is being built for — and the four requirements above are the standard to hold it to.

Sources

1. Eurostat, “How digitalised have the EU’s enterprises become?” — news article on the Digital Intensity Index, 29 August 2024. 2023 survey data: 33.8% of EU SMEs at low and 42.3% at very low digital intensity.
2. IoT Analytics, “MES Market 2025–2031: 300+ vendors replace pen & paper and spreadsheets” — research summary of the MES Market Report 2025–2031, December 2025. 54% of plants globally managed manufacturing operations with pen & paper and spreadsheets in 2024.
3. Capterra, “MRP Software vs. Spreadsheets” — analysis of software-buyer conversations with small and mid-sized manufacturers, Jan 2025–Jan 2026 (n = 1,848). Capterra notes the sample is buyers seeking tools and “may not be indicative of the market as a whole” — if anything, that understates spreadsheet reliance overall.
4. Panorama Consulting Group, The 2024 ERP Report (PDF) — survey of 131 organizations, data collected Aug 2022–Dec 2023. Median project cost $450,000 (p. 25); median timeline 15.5 months (p. 27); respondent medians: $200.5M annual revenue, 750.5 employees (p. 4).
5. Eurostat, “E-business integration” — Statistics Explained, 2025 survey data (extracted May 2026). ERP use: 41.08% of small vs. 88.71% of large EU enterprises; 57.62% in manufacturing overall.