Party Plates: Proposal to Convert to Access

Party Plates: Proposal to Convert to Access

Party Plates: Proposal to Convert to Access

Party Plates is an established manufacturing company specializing in decorative paper plates and napkins for special occasions. Because the company is growing and thrives on customer and employee satisfaction, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the information systems currently used by Party Plates is the next logical step to maintaining a successful business.

Party Plates currently uses Microsoft Excel to manage its inventory, customer base, and supplier details. Although Microsoft Excel has served Party Plates well over the years in tracking and compiling information and accomplishing this through the creation of electronic spreadsheets used for storing, organizing, and manipulating data. Microsoft Access technology that has an enhanced data management systems design will make the handling of information much easier and efficient (Cox, 2008). This is a proposal to support the implementation of a new and more efficient system to handle the needs of the company today and future growth tomorrow. Moving from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft Access will ensure that success. The program will be a better fit to improve processes of sales and tracking personnel data.

Advantages of Microsoft Access

Even though Access is Microsoft's smallest database management system it is quite capable of handling the needs of Party Plates (Lenning, 2012). A database is a compilation of associated data (Grauer, Poatsy, Mulbery, Hulett, Krebs, and Mast, 2011). Access stores data into tables and uses relationships between data tables to pull information specific to the needs of its user (Cox, 2008). These relationships are beneficial to the function of the company in the creation of queries, forms, and reports ("Microsoft Access Database Fundamentals," 2012). Even though Excel is capable of storing more than a million rows of data, Access by design can handle large databases (Cox, 2008). It can produce various reports based on the information in the tables and sub-set queries and provide that information in different formats (Grauer et al., 2011).

Because Microsoft Access is a database application, that data is stored on a hard drive or in this case the network drive, which can be accessed by more than one associate simultaneously at a time (Grauer et al., 2011). This ability increases the collaborative effort through the use of multiple users (Lenning, 2012). Further, because the data is saved once a change has been made in the tables on a hard drive it limits the potential for a catastrophic loss of data currently worked on at the time of a failure (Grauer et al., 2011).

Security is also important with respect to data storage.