Fire has captured the U.S. national headlines this fall—from the student deaths caused by a North Carolina beach house blaze to the Santa Clarita, California inferno that destroyed 21 homes, scorched 60 square miles and may well have been accidentally sparked by a 10-year-old playing with matches.

In the midst of these tragic news reports, one Atlanta-based business has been eager to broadcast its message of fire safety—more specifically, access to a known fire escape route. Viewers of the NBC's Today Show on October 16 may have caught a fire-safety segment hosted by the Home Safety Council, during which a video simulated a fast-moving fire and stressed the importance of having a reliable escape ladder handy. One of the ladders featured in that segment was the Permanent Escape and Rescue Ladder, otherwise known as PEARL. The Permanent Escape and Rescue Ladder is manufactured by PEARL Protected, an upstart that has been working hard for the past few years to penetrate the escape-ladder market in the U.S.

Profile and product boosters like a Today Show appearance help further PEARL’s success, but are not nearly as critical as the company’s earlier attempts to get its own operational house in order. Toward the end of 2005, David Duley, one of PEARL’s founders and a graduate of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, contacted Goizueta’s Steve Walton, associate professor in the practice of information systems and operations management and interim MBA director, for some operational advice. Like many entrepreneurial ventures, PEARL had been using a primitive approach to production planning—something akin to specifying orders on the backs of envelopes. The time had come to get a bit more sophisticated—but not necessarily to invest in an expensive and timely software strategy. Walton called on colleague Richard Metters, an associate professor of operations management, to consult on PEARL’s production planning. The result: a spreadsheet solution and fodder for an academic case study.

“PEARL’s actual production planning of figuring out where things should be shipped from and to what warehouse and how to figure out whether they could promise a customer delivery or not started to get a little complex,” notes Metters, who details the story of PEARL’s practical implementation in the paper, “Spreadsheets for Start-up Firms: Production Planning at PEARL Protected.” “They could no longer just wing it. They needed some kind of formal system, but they were a transitional start-up company. They needed something in between the back of the envelope and a full-fledged planning system used by a traditional manufacturing company. To fill that gap in between these two stages, Steve and I did work on a production-planning process they could use right in Excel.”

Startups, by nature, are small-staffed, nimble and, at times, decidedly low-tech with operational strategies that can fit on the desk in the corner of the basement or the garage. So why not the back of the nearest envelope for production planning? There comes a point in the lifecycle of every small business, says Metters, when a firm must move beyond basic start-up strategies. PEARL was prompted to do so, in large part, by available-to-promise, the method used to determine the timing of planned order releases. “When you go to the warehouse and look at your product and say, ‘Hey, we have 50 of these things.’ That doesn’t mean that you can sell 50 because you’ve already promised those to other customers,” explains Metters. “If you sell those 50 now, then you won’t have the product available for the customer that was counting on you delivering it on a certain date. That’s what makes it tricky enough that you need a system.” PEARL also sells to a number of different customers in different market segments, has its product manufactured overseas in two different Chinese factories, and operates two U.S. warehouses on the east and west coasts.

PEARL realized it needed a structured way to plan production, manage inventory and keep the sales force informed with accurate and timely available-to-promise data, and it needed this solution quickly. The need for simplicity, development speed, adaptability, transparency and clarity prompted the creation of a spreadsheet-based production planning system, rather than a more complex software solution. “In a startup, a lot of people are doing jobs that they’re really not expert at, so you don’t necessarily want specialty software coming at them where they have to ride a steep learning curve,” notes Metters. “You want the system itself to be as simple as possible. There’s an intellectual comfort level with spreadsheets because everyone in business has been using spreadsheets for a long time.”

Metters and Walton designed a spreadsheet-based system that organized the operational data in Excel. They arranged Excel into five separate tabs that allowed PEARL to manage key production issues, including the business constants of lead times, shipping costs and the like; forecasts; booked customer orders; scheduled production orders; and finally the actual production plan that was worked out from the information in the first four tabs. They then, through coding, connected the production plan with the determination of available-to-promise, which proved challenging, but ultimately successful.

PEARL used its spreadsheet-based production planning system for a period of 10 months before bridging over to something more formal. How to measure its spreadsheet success? In this case, stresses Metters, through metrics other than cost savings. “Management at PEARL knew they had a good production planning tool that provided accurate and timely available-to-promise information for the sales force,” write the authors. “This meant that the staff could focus on tasks that are essential to virtually any start-up firm with a new product: Gaining market exposure and driving sales of the product.” The company’s progress has been slow, but steady. While a taped segment in which PEARL appeared on the popular TV reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition ended up permanently on the cutting-room floor, PEARL has had other moments of marketing greatness, including winning several local and national building-product awards and being featured in such news outlets as The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.com.

The takeaway for entrepreneurs and managers of small businesses is that, yes, timing is indeed everything—both in terms of production planning and selecting the system that best fits their needs. Specialized software may be easy to use, but it’s not always the right choice—especially if your small team of employees is wise in the ways of spreadsheets. “We can’t allow people to think that they have to be grown up right away,” suggests Metters. “Throughout the lifecycle of the firm, they’re going to have different information needs as they go along. There’s an appropriate point in the lifecycle for doing things on the back of the envelope, an appropriate point for doing things on the spreadsheet and an appropriate point for investing in high-priced, more complex software.”