For engineering leaders in safety-critical sectors, robust traceability is the foundation of compliance. But having built solutions from the startup phase to enterprise acquisition, I know the hardest part isn’t platform capability—it’s solving user friction.
If the workflow is hard, slow, or non-interactive, engineers default to the path of least resistance: disconnected Excel spreadsheets. This leads to poor user adoption, fragmented data, and compliance risk.
The True Cost of the Status Quo
When teams rely on complex custom scripts, static Polarion reports, or manually updated Excel RTMs, they incur massive hidden costs that dwarf any initial savings:
- Skyrocketing TCO: Custom code demands ongoing expertise and maintenance, consuming up to 60%–90% of a software’s total lifecycle expenses after initial deployment. Every new business or regulatory requirement means diverting internal IT resources to modify and re-test custom tools.
- Technical Debt: Homegrown customizations often break with Polarion upgrades, creating “brittle” solutions that accumulate technical debt and quickly become frozen and outdated.
- Talent Risk: If the small team that built the custom tool moves on, their undocumented “tribal knowledge” disappears, making the tool impossible to maintain or expand.
This high-effort approach prevents the organization from achieving comprehensive, always-audit-ready traceability views.
The Strategic Pivot: Extreme Speed and Familiarity
The solution lies in providing extremely fast alignment to users by bringing the comfort of Excel directly into the rigor of Polarion.
With professionally-built add-ons like Nextedy POWERSHEET, we eliminate the friction and lower the long-term TCO. The goal is configuration, not custom development.
This commitment to Excel-like interaction delivers immediate strategic value:
- Rapid Adoption: We can take your key Excel sheet and make it live in Polarion with the exact same look, achieving transformation in one week with virtually no learning curve.
- Predictable Effort: Maintenance, bug fixes, and compatibility with new @Polarion ALM versions are handled by the vendor, shifting that perpetual burden off your internal teams and lowering your TCO.
- Built-In Governance: POWERSHEET is 100% Polarion-Native and automatically enforces correct linking and artifact placement, including Built-In Data Governance—meaning no training needed to ensure compliance.
By prioritizing usability, we empower users to effortlessly manage complexity. They get the flexibility of a spreadsheet (sort, filter, edit live) paired with the power of an ALM database (version-controlled, unlimited traceability depth).
This is how we stop engineers from moonlighting as software maintainers and instead focus resources on core innovation. The strategic decision is clear: leverage specialized products that are designed for real-world use to keep pace with evolving standards (like ISO 26262 or IEC 62304), rather than building the solution yourself.