Crew Roster and timeline view of crews

[CalebD]

Hi, I'm looking for some way to incorporate two things into an existing database that tracks information on my company's members. We frequently have teams of people doing tasks, so I'd like some way to have a control to drop names in a crew, based on position, and then have that show on a timeline view showing them on that detail.

I've attached an excel document example of something similar to what we use for this purpose. It's very limited because the management team has to do a lot of data verification, any time we have to move people around or reschedule based on life events.
In the example, I have two worksheets. One being the crew roster showing positions in rows and tasks in columns; with names being the data within the table. In the member roster, it has members in rows (organized by position) and the columns are months, with each column representing one quarter of a month, and it runs from January to December. The cells in the table have merged cells showing the different trips which gives us a utilization idea and helps us not overlap people for various things.

I would like to build that into our database for automation so that when we add members to a certain trip, it's based on their position and helps make our management process easier. It should also allow for smaller "events" like vacation, baby watch for men and baby due for women; as well as events like training, management courses or business trips.

One advantage of the timeline is it gives an object oriented view of a period of time so we can see if we're over-tasking a certain position.

Any ideas? I just started delving into Access; I'm somewhat familiar and comfortable with Excel, but I can't stick with excel for the scope of what we are moving to.

Thanks!