This article is meant for those individuals/businesses who sometimes experience a need to use their spreadsheets in the (somewhat "impersonal"?) manner described above, to get the results they want. That need would often arise out of their lack of requisite skills to get the spreadsheet to behave the way they want _ or limited time to devote towards incorporating necessary automation to make it do so.
The claims I make above are NOT exaggerated. They are in fact based on my personal experiences doing the foregoing (a). As an manager in the challenging, fast_paced manufacturing work environment of a corporate multinational (b). As a solutions developer for individuals and businesses who use MS Excel for their work.
Variable Costs Control/Reduction was a strategy that worked extremely well for the company. Most memorable for me as a brewer, was the manner in which huge monetary savings/profit gains were made by successfully implementing variable cost reduction initiatives. For instance, a brewing ingredient switch was made to a more readily available local alternative which was many times cheaper, resulting in phenomenal savings and progressively increasing profit earnings even though the price of beer produced was not raised. This practice was routinely applied across the brewing and packaging processes in line with a well thought out plan.
One Possible Application: Plotting a pie chart based on income contributions from all your products and services(daily, weekly or monthly), and reviewing the automatically computed percentages/visual pie slices, can give very illuminating insight.