AAA Benefits – Software vs. Spreadsheets
Dangers of Using Spreadsheets
Are you still designing airplanes using spreadsheets?
Did you know that on average 88% of spreadsheets contain errors.1
Do you really want to risk your design or analysis to be incorrect?
A disturbingly high percentage of professional, corporate spreadsheets contain errors.
“Close to 90% of spreadsheet documents contain errors. Spreadsheets, even after careful development, contain errors in 1% or more of all formula cells” writes Ray Panko, a professor of IT management at the University of Hawaii and an authority on bad spreadsheet practices. “In large spreadsheets with thousands of formulas, there will be dozens of undetected errors.” 1
Are you confident that your spreadsheet is error free because of your experience and thoroughness?
“When Brown and Gould (Brown & Gould, 1987) gave three spreadsheet development tasks to nine highly experienced spreadsheet developers, all made at least one error, and 63% of the spreadsheets overall had errors. Yet when asked about their confidence in the correctness of their spreadsheets, their median score was “very confident.” 3
You may think your spreadsheet is properly debugged, with various checkups and multiple eyes inspecting the code, but think again.
“In three experiments that involved individual subjects code inspecting spreadsheets seeded with errors, subjects also caught about half of all errors or fewer (Galletta et al., 1993; Galletta, Hartzel, Johnson, & Joseph, 1997; Panko & Sprague, 1998).” 3
What is the potential magnitude of having spreadsheets errors?
“JPMorgan Chase lost more than $6 billion in its ‘London Whale’ incident, in part due to spreadsheet errors.” 4
AAA BENEFITS
Tested & Verified Commercial Software Product
AAA has been tested and verified to give you confidence in your calculations while reducing the risk of costly errors that could affect your reputation, bottom line or worse: pilot and passenger safety.
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SAVES TIME
SAVES MONEY
You will spend more in a two-month period developing your own in-house code, in man-hour cost alone, than if you purchased one commercial license of AAA. You will save over 80% in man-hour costs using AAA for preliminary design, versus using handbook and spreadsheet calculations.
REDUCES ERRORS
Using AAA will greatly reduce calculation errors. Being able to use multiple flight conditions (forward c.g., aft c.g., low speed, high speed, flaps up, flaps down, etc.) is a unique feature of AAA and significantly reduces time to track data and prevent potential errors.
KEEPS IMPROVING
We use AAA for our airplane design consulting services. We are constantly updating and refining the methods used, based on our research and wind tunnel tests that we perform. This leads to regular software version updates, which benefits all of our software clients.
References
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- 88% of Spreadsheets Have Errors – Jeremy Olshan, MarketWatch
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17 - What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors – Raymond R. Panko, University of Hawai’i
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a96209a6139d6ff9a67103f827be0d8dbba36d1b - Sorry, Your Spreadsheet Has Errors (Almost 90% Do) – Stuart Leung, Salesforce on Forbes / Business
https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spreadsheet-errors/#1db2c77656ab - Companies could lose billions because of crappy spreadsheets – Rebecca Burn-Callander, The Telegraph
https://www.businessinsider.com/stupid-spreadsheet-mistakes-could-lead-to-corporate-disaster-2015-4 - 10 of the Costliest Spreadsheet Boo-boos in History – Christiane Soto, SMB
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-costliest-spreadsheet-boo-boos-history-christiane-soto - Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors – by Higher Education Press on PHYS.ORG
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html
- 88% of Spreadsheets Have Errors – Jeremy Olshan, MarketWatch
