I have 41 years of experience covering a variety of disciplines that landed me in Business Development and Analysis. I have worked in auto mechanic, satellite/space technology, warehousing & distribution as well as Materials Handling. During all that I spent time in production control, assembly, testing, machine shop, software development and data mining/reporting.
Through all of this I became very adapt at using SQL and several reporting tools that can report your existing data very effectively. I also learned, as many have had to, how to leverage Excel to really dig into that data for underlying information.
As part of all of the above, I found that VBA can really be effective at automating complicated data reduction while managing through new processes/procedures or to make seemingly complicated items more readily available to those not as adept at using spreadsheets. The important part was being able to make them end-user friendly.
Does this sound like something you need for your small-to-mid sized business? I know the overhead can be more than you can, or may want, to take on; so let me do that for you.