When we first sat down with Nordic Power Management (NPM) in 2024, they certainly weren’t lacking in expertise or industry knowledge. NPM manages large-scale energy portfolios across the Baltics, analyzing market prices and making decisions where every minute and every cent counts. Their real challenge lay elsewhere: in where and how their business actually lived every day—in dozens of complex Excel spreadsheets.
These weren’t just standard spreadsheets. They held market prices, metering data, production and consumption forecasts, and much more. Over the years, the sheets had grown massive, containing hundreds of thousands of rows and intricate webs of formulas. The system worked, but the risk was growing every day. The entire knowledge base depended on just one or two key people, and a single accidentally overwritten formula or mistaken edit could throw off the entire output.
Looking in from the outside, this might seem like a simple matter of data cleanup. At PauseDigital, we quickly realized it went much deeper than that.
Excel Isn’t a Database – It’s Hidden Business Logic
As we began unraveling NPM’s workflows, a fundamental truth we often encounter in our work became clear: the Excel spreadsheets weren’t just a place to store data for them. They contained their entire business logic.
Every custom formula represented a rule. Every manually overwritten cell, adjusted by someone years ago, was actually a critical business exception. The timing and workflow—when to open a specific sheet and in what sequence to update the data—lived entirely inside employees’ heads. The task described as “copying this data from the Nord Pool website into this cell” wasn’t just routine manual work; it was a missing system integration.
Replacing a system like this can never begin with writing code. It starts with analysis and understanding. Attempting to replace such a maze of spreadsheets all at once with new software carries a huge risk of failure. We had to untangle every formula and exception, grasp its true operational meaning, and build the solution step by step.
How We Built a 35-Module Platform
We set out to build the new solution module by module, ensuring that each completed module permanently retired a specific Excel spreadsheet. We didn’t want to create a parallel system that required updating alongside the old sheets; our goal was to steadily reduce manual workload.
With every new module deployed, hours of daily manual work—previously spent on copying data or cross-checking numbers—were eliminated. That time could now be redirected from repetitive tasks toward meaningful analysis.
We built the core technical infrastructure on Kotlin, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, and AWS, allowing the platform to process millions of rows of data quickly and securely.
Today, the result is a fully automated platform consisting of more than 35 modules. The system operates around the clock without requiring routine human intervention:
- Automatically generates forecasts and trades on the Nord Pool exchange
- Seamlessly delivers balance plans to Baltic balance handlers
- Ingests metering data from Elering with 15-minute granularity
- Delivers real-time reports, charts, and dashboards
The entire network works quietly and reliably in the background. Manual copying and pasting data from one place to another is now completely a thing of the past.
What Did This Experience Teach Us?
Throughout this project, we learned a great deal about modernizing traditional, mission-critical business processes.
First, never underestimate Excel. It is a fantastic tool for prototyping ideas, but it has its limits. When a company’s core operations and thousands of daily decisions depend on spreadsheets maintained by only a couple of people, it becomes a major business risk rather than an efficiency asset.
Second, there are no shortcuts when replacing a legacy system. You cannot build functional software without diving deep into every single cell and formula. Automating manual workflows demands patience and thorough discovery, but the payoff comes quickly. NPM’s team no longer has to worry about broken formulas or whether data has been updated on time. The system simply works.
Do You Have a Spreadsheet Like This in Your Company?
In every growing business, that one Excel spreadsheet inevitably appears sooner or later. It might be a sales forecast, a production plan, a customer registry, or a pricing calculator. It is the spreadsheet that “someone just manages” and that nobody else dares to touch.
If this sounds familiar, it is worth asking yourself: how much time and energy goes into maintaining that spreadsheet, and what happens when its sole owner goes on vacation?
Moving away from spreadsheets and building an automated system doesn’t have to mean disrupting operations or enduring months of chaos. By taking a modular approach and understanding the underlying business logic before writing code, even the most complex spreadsheet can be transformed into a system that runs on its own.