Quickbase

We were able to build and deploy business applications faster and improve our ability to drive insight from our data. We weren't able to achieve the rest because we didn't find the use yet for our company. We built our app based on our company and made it efficient for all users.

About building and deploying applications faster, I have previously mentioned and I still stand by it, that unlike development in languages such as .NET, Java or ROR, QuickBase is must faster. With features such as Sandbox (including optional mandating it), the task of deploying to production is a matter of a few minutes, not several hours even with CI/CD tools like Jenkins.
Report building in QuickBase is great, but it can be done even better. Tools like Tableau are still being used in conjunction with QuickBase because QuickBase reports look clumsy, even if they are informative.
As QuickBase is an online low-code development tool, it does not lend itself to version controlling and retrieving previous versions, etc. Therefore collaborating with other teams is pretty much limited to sharing ideas and code fragments, rather than collaborative application development. The recent audit logs are helpful for tracking what the users are doing but not much granularity in what each admin has done, in terms of which field they created or edited, which form was created, etc. So team collaboration is non-existent in QuickBase for the most part.
In the last 12 years of using QuickBase, I have solved, built and deployed multiple applications including applications that track software development efforts, Reusable Component Catalog for UiPath in QuickBase and so on.

We achieved them all to one extent or another.

Building and deploying business applications faster
We had an employee working 20+ hours a week building custom software for us. QuickBase replaced that extra position.

Improving collaboration across one or more teams
All QuickBase data is shared, any data a user creates or updates are immediately seen by others (as long as they have permissions). Team collaboration is generally directly proportional to communication and QuickBase is capable of standardizing communication very efficiently when the apps are built correctly.

Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
Since we already used custom software, we didn't want to lose features going to a generic solution. I would say that we were 90% successful. For the most part, QuickBase met those requirements. Most times it exceded them, but there were a few things that we had to still build ourselves. We had to build a custom sync from QuickBase to QuickBooks to sync orders. We lost the quickness and efficiency of drag and drop when scheduling manufacturing runs.

We've absolutely achieved the results we were after. We use it for processes and it makes huge differences in those processes.

Again it is very basic. I haven’t seen any meaningful analytics from Quick Base.

We have achieved anything that we have set out to complete with Quickbase. When we hit a brick wall in what we want to accomplish we can always make a simple request for help and they will help us get our application across the finish line and can be utilized by all in our company.

The apps that are currently in use have achieved our objectives, and we are confident that we will be able to develop more of them.

We now have knowledge that answers questions we weren't even able to ask before Quick Base, for everything from QA in sales, support, and operations to employee attendance patterns and ITSM SLAs. We've eliminated dozens of spreadsheets and replaced them with faster, easier, more collaborative workflows that are able to communicate with all of our business systems.

Fast deployment of highly customized solutions. To some extent is can be Ready Fire Aim. You don't exactly need to know where you are going to get there. So, you start with a basic foundation and build and extend from there. Of course some panning is necessary, but you don't need to plan out the whole journey.

We developed a workflow application with many roles and actions defined within 2 months that gained much of user satisfaction. It also sets an example that Quick Base can be used for building medium to complex workflow applications as well.

In agency work, like public relations, utilization is important. We needed to see "how billable" each person was to make sure we were utilizing our resources to their best potential. Before Quick Base, we could only guess about utilization during the month and get real numbers more than a month after the fact. But with Quick Base we could see in real-time what everyone was working on and measure our utilization.

It also meant we stopped going over budget and working out of scope on a lot of projects. Before Quick Base, we were using something called TimeFox, but it couldn't handle our billing methodology. So we didn't really know how much was billable until after the month was over. A lot of times we learned that we were going over budget and doing work that we wouldn't be paid for. With Quick Base, we were able to monitor spend vs. budget in real-time and eliminate a lot of those out-of-scope and over-budget hours.

We were able to make a lot of spreadsheets, docs, wiki pages and domain specific applications obsolete and consolidate everything in Quick Base. The way we can now use all that data in our daily operations is currently much more pleasant because:

• Data is easy to find
• We can make very clear reports from this structured data which help us in getting better insight
• We can easily protect data and decide who can view which data without the need for additional duplication
• Process are more structured and some automated which helps in our efficiency

Additionally we could help some smaller companies and startups to solve their business problems without the large cost of custom software development.

Looks like we are succeeding in this regard. Any changes on the client level can be updated immediately and everyone is updated with no major issues.

Quick Base became a solution for improving our estimating tool and putting it in a web based app.

Before Quick Base, we just kept a spreadsheet. It's not easy to look for information, and the information was fragmented. Some people had few pieces of information, others had other information. There were multiple people involved so it was easy to miss the information. This is why we started using Quick Base: to create a repository, which is working and can find information faster.

We have achieved each of these goals - it has taken close to a year to meet all of those goals and we are still in the process of tweaking it. We are up and running and we are very pleased with the application we have developed.

Quick Base is still an evolving product, as more functionality comes to market we incorporate the add-ons to fit our work environments.

Within my work stream I was able to model a workflow and develop a Quick Base application to replace a very manual execution process. The overall process was optimized and provided improved, accurate reporting metrics. As the program expanded, extensions to the app were made to manage & report on new tasks added to the workflow.

We have achieved these outcomes.