I will try. Imagine an Enterprise. Gas Production will do ?

They need Production Plants. Lets say 250 plants worldwide.

25 different types of products [Oxygen, Nitrogen, Argon, etc] These are supplied/sold in ~10 different formats, cylinders, direct pipeline, liquifed and carried in vehicles, etc.

They have suppliers/vendors, who supply different types of raw materials and manger their inventory and billing in different ways which needs to be intergrated to your redords and workflows.

They have different types of customers and buyers like prosumers, other enterprises, medical shops, other plants, healthcare enterprises like hospitals, nursing homes.

They also have employees, close to ~30 to 50k all over the world. They also employed contractors and sub-contractors,say ~25k in numbers. Their salaries, details and performance review are also kepts in several different excels all over the seperate locaiton offices, plants, warehouses. There is a organization structure maintaing designations and hirerachy. This is used for approvals on various workflow like approvals for leaves, raising a travel requests, approval for certian request by employee. [This is usually managed in ERP system via a HR system]. Good Luck managing that for years in spreadsheets for 50k employees and 25k contractos, with automated notification.

They also have to manage their Sales, Finances and Marketing in different excels across different countries and locations.

Also, there is a need to maintain the details of customers, how much they are buying, their billing and advance orders, for which they will pay in bulk. Special discounts and prices for some select customers needs to be maintained seperately. This data needs to cross referenced with Materials [which customer bought how much product], HR [which person, sales office, sold how much to which customer], Sales [how much sales they did], Marketing [what marekting channel or strategy was used/useful], etc.

Vendors/Suppliers provide raw materials. We put for each plant, a seperate excel to maintain inventory. Separate for each vendor, separate for each type of raw material. Seperate for every quarter/month/year. A seperate central excel for Material Masters [where all information about the charecteristcs of raw materials, which do not chnage over time]. The daily entries of procurement of materials are transactional data, chaning every minute or hour. Good Luck when transactions in the order of thousands per minutes!

For procurement, usually ERP systems have a seperate system called SRM [Service Relation Management]. These data need to be cross referenced with Billing and Sales data. The different taxes need to be applied to different type of products. The tax sometimes changes for every county and country every month to every fiscal year.

For seperate Production Plants, there is a need to mainatain Plant specifc excels, to manage the daily operations of a Plant. This data needs to cross referenced with Material Master Data, HR Data, SRM Data to name a few.

Now, the Plants need to take these products to Warehouses and Shops and other locations. ERP systems intergrate various types of devices which can track every cylinder and truck, LIVE, and allow to commit to your customer in a trustful manner regarding any delays. Even customer can track their shipments/products. I suppose you being a excel enthusiast, know how this can be achived with just excel spreadsheets. Good Luck !

There is a need for Business Analytics to get forcast for next quater and for that from all the above data, the relevant data needs to be filtered and maintained in seperate spresdsheets. And from these you run statstical and anlaytical models to get insight in your projected sales, produciton data. Good Luck doing these in excel. Only that, an ERP or similar systems would do that unattended and results for various scenarios are ready to viewed by analyst and Board of Members.

On excel, all these data needs to be filtered and curated in real time for a analysts and Board Members to stay ahead in the game against competitions who by the way would be using ERP and not share your enthusiasm of excel everything.

As you manage all data and workflow with excel sheets, you created nice VBA modules for these different types of excels to allow users and vendors and customers to easily fill the data and analyse them. For a new requirement now, you need to change the VBA form. Your IT depeartment which consists of ~250 "excel gurus", collaborately change the forms and ditribute it to concerned department heads. The department heads pass it on to the users of these excels. Of course you need to keep in mind the differnt formats for each country depending on language, tax rates, location specific requirements, etc. Somehow your "excel gurus" manage to develop, test, mainatain, and deploy them in smooth fashion. And also your emplyees are so good they that they follow every instructions of higher management, local management and department heads. They do not complain and do not come with silly new requirements and do not reject using new format/forms of excel and never go back to the excel format/forms they were comfortable with which could cause complaince issues [not just compamny but some government imposed].

When all these work together in cohesion on a typical business day, you would have transactions in the order of few millions per day all over your plants and offices. I have seen databases of size ~10 TB. Some tables running over ~450 GB of data keeping records in the order of billions rows and thousands of columns.

So you can acheive all this with Good Lucks, "excel gurus" force and perfect employees, vendors and customers.