Excel as an ERP system

Just curious if anyone has tried to take the leap in a small or medium size business and use straight Excel as an ERP system? The main functions would be sales orders linked to inventory linked to purchase and manufacturing orders.

I think the brief answer is 'NO', have you?

I've never seen one and my response if I did would be - Kill it with fire

Excel is a fancy calculator, a database it is not and this becomes immediately apparent as soon as you have one dataset that relates to another in a meaningful way

Hello Brucemapes,

Yes, Excel can be used very efficiently as a small ERP. In fact I am a professional VBA developer and this is the kind of realizations that are most demanded to me.
Excel can be used this way exactly the same way than Access is. But some forms and querying commands have to be re-built from scratch. It is all the more interesting since Excel 2007+ can handle a million rows.
You will have to use ADODB Connection and Recordset objects to query tables stored in Excel worksheets. With SQL language you can then do SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and rather complex JOIN operations. It is even possible to make your database accessible to several users (read and write access) and manage different levels of administrator/user/viewer rights.

Obviously, the ability to code rapidly with VBA is a key component since it allows to do any kind of complex processing directly inside your own application (much easily than with a "big" or third-party ERP).

Paulo

Hello,

I was simply answering Brucemapes question. He didn't ask whether or not is was a good idea to make an ERP with Excel.
In addition, the fact that probably "most senior members would not advise against...", as Kyle comment suggests, doesn't prove anything and is not really relevant to Brucemapes question. I say that because, indeed, you cannot prove something does not exist

To actually answer the initial question, yes I have already developed ERPs for small and medium businesses. Many of my customers are interested and impressed when I do live presentations. ERPs are efficient, cheap to develop and to make evolve. If you want to know how this is possible, I have to admit things get more technical. Simply figure out that the final user don't see any Excel-related components (only forms and reports).

Best regards,
Paulo

Paulo,
In think we first need to clarify what do we mean by ERP(Enterprise, Resources Planning)

This is the definition from wiki

"Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a cross-functional enterprise system driven by an integrated suite of software modules that supports the basic internal business processes of a company. ERP gives a company an integrated real-time view of its core business processes such as production, order processing, and inventory management, tied together by ERP applications software and a common database maintained by a database management system"

"cross-functional and integrated" are the most important words.
I agree with Kyle . IMO, excel is not designed for storing data, but for analysis and data manipulation.
I am not disputing the fact you have developed ERP system, but this is not the norm in the real word, hence having ERP and Accounting applications are all developed in data base systems. For e.g.. SAP and Oracle.

Hello,

Of course I agree with you both about the fact that using Excel as an ERP is definitely not an obvious choice.
But, just read carefully the question of Brucemapes : he wants to know if anyone has ever used Excel as an ERP system. Behind his simple question, we don't know if he just needs advices on how to choose an ERP solution or if he is expecting some clues on how to use Excel as an ERP (maybe using Excel is mandatory or a strong constraint for him, we don't know...).

Being on an Excel-dedicated forum, I found interesting to claim it was possible to use Excel as an ERP, to a certain extent, whatever people can think (more or less rightly) about it. From my point of view and regarding my past experiences, I have got strong evidences this approach was not meaningless

Goodbye,
Paulo

We can't make Excel as an ERP But we can make ERP with an Excel-like UI

Yes I have done 100%