Someone's asked me to create a system that monitors the efficiency of several machines in a factory. THey have 'No' money to do it (as it's only a 'temporary fix for a year or 2 ....'), so it has to be the cheapest, easiest solution.
Each machine can produce several different products, with their own target efficiencies and costs etc. They ALSO want to know how many people it took to run, so the system can work out how much it cost to run.
They have a solution in place in an excel spreadsheet, but it's totally unwieldy, making changes to anything requires repeating those changes in about 20 different places. The only benfit is that the spreadsheet is very easy to use.
I'm considering doing it in MS Access, to make maintenance easier, but at a reduced cost (with an option to move the tables to an SQL server but keep the access 'database' as a front-end)
Is there a 'best practice' model that I could use to justify moving from excel to access, or is there anything else that I could use that would be as cheap and easy?
Any thoughts welcome! |
