I certainly have an inclination as to what you're up against. While I used Access to mine such data, the GUI was built in Power Builder and probably resided on sql server (I never concerned myself with that part). Here's a link that you might find interesting about the company I retired from - note that I'm not promoting anything that is offered anywhere, but this might give you some insight as to how a maintenance culture can change due to the implementation of a CMMS
https://reliabilityweb.com/articles/...e_steel_manufa
Perhaps it's my experience with that CMMS that made it seem like an interesting article to me. Regardless, my message would be that given your statement, I believe you would be taking on a MASSIVE project in order to do it well. IMHO, it would not be a part time job during development and the likelihood is that ongoing support and development would be the future of such a project. I would not be surprised if it took you 1 or 2 years just to get something that you could use, and that's primarily because while the Access learning curve for this may not be real steep, it will be very long. I think the last thing you want to do is build something based on macros, so that will add learning vba code to the list of things to be learned.
I know that doesn't give you a whole lot of direction on where to learn. We all have our favourites, so there's no real cut and dried answer. There are tons of resources.
The more we hear silence, the more we begin to think about our value in this universe.
Paraphrase of Professor Brian Cox.