Integrating Google Sheets into Business Processes: An Innovative Approach

The use of google sheets as an operational work tool is spreading more and more due to the undisputed advantages they offer, like the simplicity of their use and the possibility of centralizing and sharing information in a safe and immediate way, overcoming some critical issues that limited the use of excel files in business processes. This article shows an innovative approach in the use of google sheets through the development of a configurable and scalable middleware to verify the correctness and consistency of some key fields within the individual google sheets and among those connected to them, in order to allow the use of google sheets as a constantly updated and consistent data set. The added value of the control middleware, which consists in guaranteeing constantly consistent data, allows google sheets to be used not only as a support for the management of business processes, but also as master data sources for the automatic and real time updating of all the applications that use them.