Advice on potential improvement in managing the gap for deal flow and portfolio ops?

Hi everyone. I'm researching technology gaps in Private Equity workflows. I am an ex finance professional and are out of the industry for a while so would appreciate the recent update from anyone. Thanks

From the outside it seems like most firms run some combination of DealCloud / Affinity / Salesforce for deal flow, and then a lot of portfolio companies run their own systems. I've also heard some larger firms try to standardize operations across portcos using things like ServiceNow or similar workflow platforms.

But I'm curious what it actually looks like in practice.

For lots of manual work or messy processes you have done -

(for example deal sourcing, organizing diligence materials, internal communication during a live deal, tracking portfolio company performance, comparing metrics across portfolio companies, post-acquisition integration) -

are there areas you think can be better done other ways? For example, from the time I was in the job, we only used Excel but I always feel it is not the best way to organize the data efficiently.

Just trying to get a better sense of what actually works vs what still feels clunky inside PE workflows.