The spreadsheet is failing you, and you already know it. The problems you describe, duplicate work, vague statuses, no filtering, outdated shipping data, are not Excel limitations you can fix with better formulas. They are structural cracks that appear when a human-powered tracking system tries to serve a team that has outgrown it. You built a custom email ticket system that reduced missed requests, which shows real resourcefulness. But that fix only moved the bottleneck downstream. Now your team is drowning in the part that comes *after* staging: changes, comments, partial shipments, multiple sources, and a printed email that cannot talk to the ticket it came from.
You asked whether a centralized Excel tracker would work. The honest answer is no, not for long. Excel can handle the columns you described, dispatcher, technician, part source, status, dates, and you could even rig up conditional formatting to highlight overdue service dates. But Excel was never designed to manage concurrent updates from remote technicians, dispatchers, inventory staff, and shipping teams. Every time someone saves a new version, you lose the old one. Every time a status changes, someone has to remember to update the sheet. Every time a comment is added to a ticket, it lives in a separate system from the part record. You end up with the same problem you have now, just in a different file. What you need is a tool that treats each part request as a living record, not a row in a static table.
Look for a purpose-built inventory or field-service management platform that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics and your email workflow. The ideal solution would auto-create a record from each incoming request email, link packing slips and POs directly to that record, and send email notifications when statuses change. It should allow you to assign granular statuses, not just "waiting" but "backordered from supplier," "staged for technician pickup," "shipped with carrier X", and let you filter by technician, location, or part source in two clicks. You should be able to generate a printable shipping sheet from any record without copying and pasting. And when a service date passes, the system should flag it, not wait for someone to notice. That exists. It does not require custom development or a consultant to build a bespoke database.
The path forward is not to make Excel bend harder. It is to stop treating your part tracking as a spreadsheet problem and start treating it as a workflow problem. You have already proven you can design a better intake process. Now extend that thinking to the full lifecycle of a part request. The tools exist. The only question is whether your organization is ready to adopt one.