Quick Base to the rescue
April 30, 2018
Quick Base to the rescue
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base
Quick Base is being used throughout our organization, however primarily on the operations side of the business. It is being used to track all of our customers' project data, our vehicles, our IT assets, quoting parameters, equipment maintenance, knowledgebase and field linking between various software platforms. It has become a software platform that is critical to our business. Prior to developing and moving the data to Quick Base, this data was stored in various spreadsheets within multiple departments without a method to access it efficiently.
- The low/no code feature of Quick Base is critical to its success in our organization. The ability to design and modify as our actual needs are uncovered is a key feature. We can implement the basic model of moving the data from a spreadsheet and then begin to add features and additional tools as we have time and get feedback.
- Quick Base does a great job of making a lot of data visible in an efficient manner and then to be able to tie that data with other related data to create reports, summaries and charts has been very helpful as well, although that feature requires a bit more effort in design and configuration.
- Just having Quick Base as a resource for database development has opened new doors on process improvements that we would not have thought of without Quick Base. Once we had set up the first app and looked through the Quick Base app library, all kinds of other areas of the business became options to implement its features as well.
- Quick Base is a relational database, however creating those relationships and making them work as expected can be complex and frustrating. Once they are set up correctly, they work great, however it really pays to think through what you want to accomplish before attempting to set up all the pieces.
- Some of the connecting reporting between tables is not straight forward and requires some work around.
- The only types of relationships between table is many to one. There is no many to many relationships without adding a new table between the 2 tables.
- Moving fields around on a form is cumbersome and time consuming.
Quick Base has allowed us to develop and improve in continual iterations of the app rather than having a lot of meetings with high cost consultants, designing everything on paper and then waiting months before we get a beta copy, making changes back and forth and then releasing it to the end users. Quick Base allows us to deliver a lot of information without many features, get info back from the end users, implements new features quickly, get more feedback, make improvement, etc, etc. This back and forth and continual improvements has worked very well for us delivering benefits one small step at a time and allow users to get used to the product over time rather than a set implementation date and the stress that usually comes along with software installations.
It was 3 years ago that we did our comparison with other options, however the flexibility and feature set of Quick Base and the price point, made Quick Base an easy decision. Also, the age and stability of the company.
Quick Base is a citizen developers platform and no code / low code tool, however to deliver a feature set beyond the basic moving a spreadsheet of data to a database structure, requires someone within the organization or an outside experienced builder to really champion and develop the a complete solution. Without the extra efforts and expertise of someone who understands what the end results should look like and how to structure the data and the related tables to deliver these results, I could see this tool being only "kind of" used, ie just another tool where we stick data. The more advanced features and thus more expertise required from the designed/developer, is where the efficiencies and value begin to shine and create buy in from the end users. Quick Base does not require the ability to code, but it does require the ability to see how to how to structure data to deliver the desired results.
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
We have been able to and are continue to deliver on the outcomes expected from our Quick Base implementation and development. We have a list of over 15 current projects that we have been working on which will deliver even more efficiencies and better insights into our operations, both from a looking back perspective as well as planning for the future needs.
QuickBase is great at making small changes to improve efficiency as well as adding whole new feature sets quickly as the needs of our organization change or new questions are asked. Maintaining the existing applications is simple and can be done manually or via importing data or via the API capabilities. Last fall, we realized that we were missing a lot of data that could be provided from our estimating software and our CRM platform. Within a few weeks, we have isolated the exact data that we wanted to come across from these packages and built the API feature set to bring this data into our QuickBase app as each new project was imported.