From Spreadsheet Chaos to Digital Quality Backbone: Why AM Quality Needs More Than Excel

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Talk to any QA manager or Head of AM and you’ll hear a familiar story.

Quality “lives” in Excel and shared folders. Build histories, inspection results, powder certificates, CT images, machine logs, all spread across different files and systems. When a customer or auditor asks, “Why did this happen?” the real work is hunting, copying and reconciling data before you can even start analysing it.

That heroic spreadsheet culture is how many AM teams got started. But as metal AM moves into production-grade, certified parts, it becomes the ceiling rather than the foundation.

Why Spreadsheets can't keep up

Additive manufacturing generates data at every step:

• Powder batches, mixes and reuse cycles
• Parameter sets, build histories and machine events
• Heat treatment, machining, surface finishing
• Dimensional inspection, CT, mechanical tests

Excel is brilliant for local calculations. It is not a robust way to manage this much process and quality data over months and years.

The cracks show when you need:

• Part-level traceability across machines, shifts and powder lots
• SPC and trends over many builds, not just a single job
• Consistent, audit-ready documentation for demanding customers and regulators
• Multiple sites and partners to work from a single source of truth

You can prove that this part passed today. It’s much harder to explain why, and whether tomorrow’s parts on another machine will behave the same.

What we mean by a "Digital Quality Backbone"

A digital quality backbone is AM-specific quality software that sits between your machines and your business systems. It’s not another general MES. It’s not just dashboards. It’s a software solution developed by amsight, built from the ground up around quality-critical AM data.

In practice, that means:

• All relevant data in one place: powder, process, post-processing and inspection, all linked at part level
• End-to-end traceability, you can follow any part back to its material lot, parameter set and process chain in a few clicks
• Built-in SPC and analysis, trends and control charts are generated from live data, not rebuilt by hand in Excel
• Documentation by design, conformity reports and audit packs come straight out of the system, not out of someone’s personal spreadsheet collection

This is exactly what amsight’s software was designed to do, turn AM quality data from scattered evidence into a structured, reusable asset that underpins both compliance and continuous improvement.

Why "better spreadsheets" aren't enough

It’s tempting to think, “We’ll just tidy up what we have.” But the issue isn’t your discipline, it’s the tool:

• Excel has no built-in concept of builds, parts, lots or machines
• Relationships exist in people’s heads, not as enforced links
• Versioning and collaboration get fragile as more people and sites join in
• Every new machine, material, or inspection workflow adds complexity and risk

For sectors like space, aviation, energy, defence and medical, that fragility becomes a strategic risk. At some point, the question is no longer “Can we make this work?” but “Should we still rely on this?”

A pragmatic path from chaos to backbone

The good news? You don’t need a multi-year IT transformation to start moving beyond Excel. A realistic journey looks like this:

1. Map the reality
   Identify where your quality data actually lives today, which systems, which spreadsheets, which people.
2. Pick a focused pilot
   Choose one product family or machine cluster and centralise its data into a dedicated AM quality software solution such as amsight.
3. Automate the worst pain first
   Start with the tasks that consume QA time, manual report building, data copy-paste for audits, re-entering inspection results.
4. Layer on insight
   Once the data flows, use SPC, dashboards and traceability tools to spot drift, link deviations to root causes, and stabilise processes.
5. Scale what works
   Use real wins (fewer hours in Excel, faster audits, reduced scrap) to justify rolling the digital backbone out to more machines and sites.

From Heroics to infrastructure

Excel has earned its place in every AM engineer’s toolkit. But as you aim for reliable, certified, multi-site production, quality needs infrastructure, not heroics.

A digital quality backbone (the kind of software amsight provides) gives QA managers and Heads of AM a stable foundation for every audit, every optimisation project, and every new application. It turns data from a by-product into a competitive advantage.

If you recognise your own “Excel hell” in this story, it might be time to see what life looks like with a backbone instead of a spreadsheet. Next step, book a short amsight demo and bring one of your real quality challenges to explore live.