Advice Needed

[nyydynasty]

Hey all -

I'm looking for some advice so I appreciate your patience while I explain the situation.

I'm an IT manager and we're working on upgrading hundreds of corporate laptops over the next 6 + months across the entire US (not just for local users). The business is giving me an Excel spreadsheet with employee names, laptop serial numbers, their choice of laptop model upgrade, and some other information.

What I need to do is come up with a way to track everything:

1) have we contacted the employee to confirm which laptop model they want for their upgrade?
1a) If yes, then I need to track the date of first contact.
1b) if we contacted them, I need to track how long it takes for them to respond (i.e. their response date)

2) have we contacted them once we start their upgrade to request passwords and other required information?
2a) if so, when did we contact them (i.e. again, our contact date)
2b) just like the first one, we need to track how long it takes for them to respond (i.e. their response date).

3) once we complete the upgrade, we'll be shipping the laptop so I need to track shipping details such as tracking # and tracking date
3a) after the user receives the upgrade, have we followed up with them to ensure everything is good to go (i.e. follow up date)

I was originally thinking of not overly complicating this project and just add columns to an Excel spreadsheet for each of these items and having my team input all these details manually but am I not considering an easier or more efficient way of doing this? I'm not a Microsoft Apps expert but I thought maybe there's an easier way to do this using Access or something like that.

My corporate account does have access to M365 apps but I have to check what exactly I have access to.

Thank you for any help you can provide. If not....well, thanks anyway

 

[Logit]

EXCEL can easily handle hundreds of input data. Access would be overkill.

Look at it this way .... Excel is used everyday for huge financial corporation to track their financials. Some of those workbooks might have 30 or more sheets of data, with each
sheet being hundreds of rows in size. Each of those sheets might have tens of formulas embedded into the cells as well was a handful of macros all working in the background.

Your project is a small database of data. Excel will do it.

 

[Logit]

If you are interested in viewing a sample database in Excel :

DATABASE CUSTOMERS.xlsm

 

[rlv01]

Since you are an IT manager, I'm going to address this from a business perspective instead of "how can I code this in excel?" point of view: For someone such as yourself facing the challenge of tracking hundreds of PC upgrades in a corporate environment , creating a home-grown solution would be like building a digital watch in your garage instead of just going to a shop and buying one. Admirable in a way, but ultimately a waste of time that could be more productively spent elsewhere. There are many on-line support and or PC/Asset management products dedicated to this kind of IT support. Typically these programs create a "case", "ticket" or "workflow" that allows your team to track all contact with the the case initiator, track completion, and have a rich set of dashboard features that allow you to produce reports about the overall status of one case, or groups of cases. I see this from the other end. I get an email telling me that my corporate laptop needs to be renewed with a link. The link sends me to a workflow form where I choose among the offered models, accessories, etc. Once I submit it, then periodically I get emails informing me of the status. Or if I ignore the first email, there are many subsequent nagging emails (all auto generated). This is all from some management product that our IT department selected, purchased, and deployed. If you have to track hundreds of PCs, unless you have a very large staff, doing it manually with a spreadsheet will be painful. You could code it in-house using VBA, but time, effort, and lost opportunity cost would be high as compared to purchasing a solution designed for exactly this kind of asset management.

 

[nyydynasty]

thank you all for your input

 

[Logit]

You are welcome. Let us know if we can assist.