Excel vs AI 8D Reports — I Did Both For a Month

> TL;DR: AI saved me 11.2 hours and produced reports that were more consistent. Time Comparison Step Excel AI Setup & formatting 25 min 1 min D0-D3 35 min 5 min D4 RCA 45 min 8 min D5-D6 30 min 6 min D7-D8 20 min 4 min Review & polish 15 min 20 min Total ~170 min ~44 min AI was about 74% faster. My hand-written reports were sometimes better (when I had energy), sometimes worse (Friday 4PM). The AI reports were always decent. If you do one 8D a month, Excel is fine. If you do 3 or more, AI saves real time. What This Means For the team I manage, we do about 20 customer 8Ds per month. At 2.5 hours each that is 50 hours of work. With AI, we are at about 44 minutes each which is about 15 hours. That save my team 35 hours a month. That's almost a full week of someone's time. Not everyone will see these numbers — it depends on your industry and the complexity of your problems. But for automotive quality teams dealing with regular customer complaints, this is realistic. The other takeaway: AI does not eliminate the need...