Imagine going on a long road trip to a city you have never visited before. Would you plan your trip with paper maps? Gather cassette tapes to reduce the boredom of the highway miles? Call your significant other from a payphone when you safely arrived?
I would think (hope?) that the answer is “no” to such questions. Then why does so much of the CPG [consumer packaged goods] still run business planning on Microsoft Excel? Excel was released in 1985…yes, 1985. Sure, it has added functionality over the past four decades and remains an easy-to-use, familiar technology. But is it the best solution to help your business compete on cost, retailer partnership, and speed in 2026?
Why is Excel so popular?
Across the board, most business planning is still done with Excel. In CPG, it's used for many planning functions, from sales and operations planning (S&OP) to financial planning and analysis to sales performance management to trade promotion. Industry surveys have made the same finding for years running: countless of organizations still lean on Excel somewhere in their technology stack.
It's a reasonable assumption that, regardless of your organizational role, you use a spreadsheet to execute some tasks in your job because it's familiar. Your organization may even have specialized point solutions or ERP modules for such tasks, yet Excel continues to dominate most planning activities because it is:
- Easy to use and purchase; doesn't require a lot of help from IT
- Extremely flexible and can be adapted to just about any planning need
- Readily available; easy to install and access across every OS and platform, online and off
But Excel, while still leaned on by so many for so much, has three significant challenges.
Significant Challenges of Excel
- Security: Spreadsheets can be easily shared with others both inside and outside the organization, creating data security risks. Additionally, the data itself can be changed, and very quickly a "single version of the truth" is lost. In many organizations, there's a lack of consistency in measure and calculation definitions, for example, the definition of "incremental volume." Without security and consistency around master data, there's a proliferation of versions and a movement away from a single version of the truth.
- Scalability: Spreadsheets are not scalable to handle the volume of data required for enterprise planning. A spreadsheet may be fine for smaller models, but when used to plan across multiple employees, brands, geographies, or businesses, the size becomes unwieldy. Enterprise models also need to pull data from multiple, disparate source systems. It's difficult to create scalable, repeatable processes to manage data cleansing, manipulation, and loading into planning spreadsheets. Time spent integrating data and waiting for models to recalculate becomes both frustrating and inefficient.
- Auditability: The data and any changes made are typically not auditable. It becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand the data lineage of information or who made what changes to a plan or scenario. This challenge is amplified in larger organizations as spreadsheets proliferate across departments and business units. In worst-case scenarios, the lack of auditability creates a lack of trust in the models and plans, which leads to shadow planning activities running in parallel.
Point solutions have not fixed the issues (but have added a new one)
Many companies tried to address the issues of Excel through point solutions purpose-built for a single function, TPM (trade promotion managment) tools chief among them. These solved many of Excel's weaknesses outlined above.
Point solutions are very secure, with access control down to the individual cell or field level in most cases. They're scalable and not challenged by large planning models that span an enterprise's geography, business units, or brand hierarchies. And they provide auditability as most include embedded workflows, so changes are controlled and best practices may be enforced across an organization.
But these solutions often come at a price. Point solutions are inflexible and require specialized skillsets, typically within IT, to install, configure, and adapt to evolving marketplace conditions. And here's a problem that's only gotten worse: a point-solution TPM lives in its own silo. It optimizes trade spend in isolation from S&OP, financial planning, and account planning, which means the numbers a brand team commits to in TPM often don't reconcile cleanly with what finance is modeling upstream or what the account team is negotiating with the retailer.
Most companies today operate with a hybrid model: point solutions combined with Excel, stitched together across supply chain, sales, marketing, finance, and HR, between systems of record and the end-user dashboards and BI layer people actually work in. Industry practitioners once described this as the "messy middle" and it has calcified into "the way things are" at most CPG and beverage alcohol companies.
The new reality
A few years back, the pressure businesses faced was typically operational: plan with speed, work remotely, survive disruption. In 2026, the pressure is strategic and dual-sided. Manufacturers now have to minimize cost and protect distribution while simultaneously telling retailers a category-growth story (traffic, basket size, share), not just a brand-volume story. A trade promotion plan that only optimizes for the manufacturer's P&L, disconnected from what it means for the retailer's shelf and category performance, is increasingly a non-starter in the room.
At the same time, AI has entered the conversation, sometimes usefully, mostly as noise. It's worth being precise here: deterministic planning engines (the kind that power connected planning platforms) are transparent and tunable, and they're the right tool when a number is going into a financial commitment or a contract. Probabilistic, LLM-based AI is genuinely useful for pattern-finding, summarization, and assistive analysis, but it is not, and should not be treated as, authoritative for numbers that end up in a P&L. Any TPM strategy in 2026 that doesn't draw this line clearly is setting itself up for a governance problem down the road.
What is the technology stack for 2026?
Is slinging Excel spreadsheets and PDFs between brand, finance, and account teams really the best practice in this age of "digital transformation?" (Note to the clever ones: Sharing an Excel file via Slack or Teams doesn't count as digital transformation.)
What if there were a platform that was business-owned, flexible, and easy to manage, like a spreadsheet, but also secure, scalable, and auditable, like a point solution? And what if that same platform could connect Trade Promotion to S&OP, financial planning, and account planning, instead of optimizing each in its own silo?
That's exactly the gap connected planning platforms like Anaplan are built to close. They give business owners the flexibility of a spreadsheet without losing the governance of a point solution, and critically, they let trade spend live as a native part of the broader commercial plan, not a reconciled afterthought bolted on at quarter-end.
Why connected planning beats Excel (and point-solution TPM)
I first learned about Anaplan in late 2019 and became genuinely excited about how it could solve planning challenges I had spent much of my career trying to solve with earlier technologies. I'd worked with IRI Express (later Oracle Express) going back to 1992, building advanced planning solutions, especially in Trade Promotion Management. Express was a multi-dimensional database and programming environment that was genuinely good at solving complex planning problems for its era.
I've always thought of platforms like Anaplan as the direct descendant of Express: born on the cloud, far more scalable, and, critically, connected across the functions that trade promotion actually touches. That connectivity is the piece point-solution TPM still can't offer, and it's the piece that matters most in 2026.
A new way of planning (for real this time)
Why does this matter now? Because the dual mandate (protect cost and distribution while telling a retailer-value story) isn't something a disconnected spreadsheet-and-point-solution stack can support. It requires planning that's genuinely connected: where a change in trade funding is visible in the P&L, the account plan, and the category story at the same time.
What's held organizations back isn't the platform. It's people and process: the change management, the governance discipline, and the organizational will to actually adopt a new way of working instead of defaulting back to the spreadsheet everyone already knows.
The tools you use to plan dictate how well you can execute. Clinging to the spreadsheet-and-siloed-software model is no longer just an operational annoyance—it's a strategic liability. To meet the dual demands of protecting margins and driving retailer growth in 2026, organizations must move beyond the messy middle. By embracing connected planning, you can finally bridge the gap between sales, finance, and trade spend, turning your planning stack from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.