7 Signs Your Factory Has Outgrown Excel and Microsoft Access

Excel and Microsoft Access are good tools. Most factories start with them, and for a while they are enough. The trouble starts quietly. Nobody decides one morning that the spreadsheet has failed. It simply gets slower, people stop trusting it, and work moves back onto paper.

I saw this from the inside. The textile mill where I work ran its production records on one Access file before I built its ERP. These are the signs I saw there, and the signs I now look for when a business owner asks me whether they need a real system.

1. People wait for their turn to enter data

Access locks its file. In practice, one person works while the others wait. In a mill, fabric is received, printed, dyed, finished and dispatched at the same time, so five departments need the same file at the same moment.

When staff cannot get in, they write on paper and type it in later. That one habit causes most of the other problems on this list.

2. Your reports show yesterday, not today

If data is entered late, every report is late. The owner asks a simple question in the afternoon and gets an answer that was true the evening before. Decisions about delivery dates and machine loading are made on old numbers.

3. Nobody can say where an order is right now

Each department keeps its own sheet in its own style. To find one lot you ask the printing supervisor, then the finishing supervisor, then dispatch, and add the answers together yourself. A system should answer "where is this lot?" in one click.

4. A number changed and nobody knows who changed it

In a spreadsheet, anyone who can open the file can change any cell. There is no record of the old value. In a mill, a quantity is metres of fabric, and metres are money. When 500 becomes 5,000 and nobody knows why, you do not have a data problem. You have an accountability problem.

5. One person makes the reports by hand

At the end of every shift somebody copies figures from several sheets into one summary. It takes an hour or more, it is done differently by each person, and it stops when that person is on leave.

6. Everything depends on one file on one computer

Ask yourself what happens if that computer dies tonight. If the honest answer is "we lose years of records", the business is carrying a risk that costs very little to remove.

7. The file is slow, large and fragile

Files grow. Formulas break when someone inserts a column. A sheet that took one second to open now takes a minute. People start keeping their own copies "to be safe", and now there are five versions of the truth.

What to do about it

Seeing two or three of these signs does not mean you must buy a large, expensive ERP package. It means your data now needs three things a spreadsheet cannot give:

• Many people entering data at the same time
• One shared database, so every department sees the same numbers
• A record of every change, with a name and a time

That can be a system built around the way your business already works. When I replaced the mill's Access file, I kept the screen numbers staff already knew, so the new system felt familiar from the first day. You can read how it went in the textile mill ERP case study.

Your old records do not have to be thrown away either. Moving them is real work, but it is very possible. I wrote about it in how to move from Access to MySQL without losing data.

If you recognise your own business in this list, tell me what is going wrong and I will tell you honestly whether you need a new system or only a better spreadsheet.