Dear Access gurus,



I would like to take few suggestions for my attempt at working on an access based application. I am quite used working on Excel (can be considered as an experienced developer), but this will be my first attempt at using Access as a database.

My requirement: I am working for a client of mine who needs an application to update the status of his orders. There will be several checks for each order
  1. Order Date
  2. Delivery details
  3. Inventory update
  4. Quality check
  5. Finance dept update

etc.,. All of these above are checks performed by several people each specific to a department. All of them perform a check against the order and update it with current status (Approved, Pending Approval, Rejected etc.,). There will also be some sub statuses for Pending Approval and Rejected.

In addition to the above core module, there will be several directors who are interested in day-to-day reports and dashboards to assess the company status. There is also an automated module, which download data from the SAP every morning, updates the database, then scans through the database and shoots out emails on pending orders and statuses to respective persons/departments.

End Users: There will be more than 10 people accessing the same database and updating it. Some might be using it only for read-only purpose, but most of them will be updating database. Each of them will be having restricted access to update certain department.

I need your help in designing the best strategy to tackle these requirements.
My strategy:
I am planning to design and use Access as a database, which can be placed in the shared network drive. Create one workbook for every employee to perform his tasks (this is to overcome the sharing violations issues with excel files). Create excel add-in for all the report generation tasks. Finally, create a script to run automated task to open Access and update daily records from SAP and send emails (this I still need to figure out how to do).

I would be great full, if you can suggest me if the above strategy works the best or are there any flaws, that I didn't foresee.

Thanks in advance,

Regards,
RK.