Top 10 Signs That You Have Outgrown Your Existing Software

Below are the 10 most common signs that you have outgrown your existing business application and it is time to either re-engineer your application, or migrate to a more robust, commercial-grade database solution. There are a number of different options available — the right approach depends upon the issues you are experiencing, your go-forward business needs, and the reality of budget and schedule constraints. It can sometimes make good sense to migrate application components in a step-wise fashion, based upon your business priorities vs. a wholesale refactoring of your entire application at once. I will look carefully at your situation and needs, and help you determine the most appropriate and economical approach.

1. Growing Number of Users in Different Locations

   MS Excel and MS Access applications are not designed (or well-suited) for multi-user/multi-site deployments within distributed business environments, where productivity and profit relies heavily on the ability to create, share and manage large amounts of proprietary information among business partners and customers in different locations — all within a secure, repeatable work flow. The ease-of-use and flexibility that both MS Excel and MS Acces provide for easily modeling unique (and aften complex) data management needs can quickly spin out of control and become unmanageable. As desktop and LAN tools are made available to more and more end users, the value to the business goes down, and costs and issues with data increase. Learn more about MS Excel and MS Access deficiencies.

2. Poor Data Integrity

   Proper business data integrity insures that all your business data follow consistent and valid data formats and constraints — so that your application functions properly, and the calculations and business rules that automate your business are accurate and reliable. Absent proper data integrity, the Reports that you use to make business decisions become suspect, or even useless. Enforcing data integrity requires programming data validation rules into your system at the database level. MS Excel and MS Access provides little to no means to establish or validate data integrity. Learn more about SQL Server/Smart Client data integity.

3. Unacceptable Application Performance

   The root-cause of poor application performance is due most often to deficiencies in the underlying database schema design. This is true for any database application, including MS Access and MS SQL Server. In addition, MS Access is limited in the number of users it can support at one time, and the amount of data it can store. Poor MS Access performance may be a signal that your application is poorly designed; it can also be a signal that you are outgrowing the limitations that are inherent to the MS Access program. Continually compacting, restoring or repairing currupt MS Access systems can buy you extra time —time that is best used to refactor or migrate your MS Access application. Learn more about common issues that impair MS Access application performance.

4. Amount of Data is Expanding

   If you are pushing the data store limitations of MS Access, or you have run out of Columns or Rows in MS Excel, it is probably time you seriously consider moving to a real database platform to support your business data management needs. While Microsoft advertises that MS Access can handle up to a 2 GB datastore, in reality you will notice appreciable degradation in performance and stability over 1 GB. A large number of records, independent of their size, can also push MS Access datastore limitations. Common work-arounds include deleting or archiving older data, but this prevents you from accessing historical information when you most need it, and this prevents you from analyzing important trends in your business. Learn more about MS Access datastore limitations.

5. Security Absent or Deficient

   MS Excel and MS Access can only be protected by 2 things: a Password, and the operating system itself e.g. security attributes set by the network administrator at the network hard drive and directory levels. Neither Excel or Access provide secure mechanisms to establish, manage and validate security and true End User authentication. In addition, the reality of business requires that different people inside and outside your organization have certain 'data management priviliges' associated with their individual business function or role i.e. the ability to view and modify certain types of information. Role-based application Learn more about SQL Server/Smart Client application security.

6. Inadequate Reporting

   I see this quite often: a business with 85 reports, 7 of which are actually used, and even these are inadequate to the business needs. If you have a simple application with 6 or so tables, with a limited sub-tables and less-than-complex relationships among the various data fields, MS Access may be perfectly suitable to your reporting neeeds. MS Access also makes it easy to design new reports, and perform ad hoc queries. If your reporting needs require more complex data modeling and formatting, or more robust nested queries, or your reports need to be high performance and 'bullet-proofed,' then SQL Server Reporting Services may be right approach. Beyond canned reports, you may have 'ad hoc' reporting needs that require a more flexible approach such as dynamic grids or SQL Server Analysis Services controls embedded directly into your application. Learn more about canned and dynamic reporting and business intelligence options.

7. Application is Unreliable

   Does your application run like a work horse 24x7? Does it crash frequently causing employee downtime and/or lost or corrupt data? The "reliability" of an MS Access application is constrained primarily by the quality of application design (poor application design and development decisions), and furthermore by the limitations of the MS Access platform itself. I can help you undestand whether remedial engineering of your MS Access application, or migrating your MS Access application to the SQL Server platform makes the most sense. Learn more about common issues that impact MS Access application reliability.

8. Growing Workflow Complexity

   The MS Access platform may be well-suited to supporting your application needs, provided that the workflow required to support your business process is fairly simple i.e. linear, and the information model is straightforward i.e. many interdependent relationships among discrete pieces of information is not required to support your business process. Complex business processes and associated workflows is the primary reason why companies look to develop custom applications from scratch vs. using the capabilities available in MS Excel or MS Access. MS SQL Server, in combination with a .NET Smart Client front-end application, provides a number of efficient ways to model the application interface around complex business processes and workflows, and is usually the most cost-effective approach as well.

9. Industry Compliance

   Specfic attention to application design and development processes, and associated documentation, is required to insure compliance with a number of regulatory and business compliance standards including HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11, ISO and others. MS Access is HIPAA non-compliant, due primarily to poor application and data security. A custom-design a SQL Server based application is required to meet minimal HIPAA requirements.

10. Mission Criticality on the Increase

    I also see this situation quite often — a business with 75 employees that is running its day-to-day operations on a patchwork combination of MS Excel and MS Access applications that are cobled together with duct tape and bailing wire, with 2-3 individuals who are responsible for "holding the system together" and producing custom reports for management. Employee downtime is commonplace, and important business data is often missing or unreliable. If this situation sounds familiar to you, it is probably time that you seriously consider refactoring your application to streamline workflow, and improve productivity and data integrity. I can help you get the system back on track, and mitigate your business risk until a new system is designed, developed and securely in place.