Quick Base - The Future of Rapid Application Development!

Our company uses QuickBase across the majority of our company/organization. It's been able to assist with better managing where our fleet equipment is, to assisting operations teams with better, more comprehensive tracking of work sites in real-time. Ultimately, it has helped move us away from using old, outdated Excel spreadsheets to track daily business operations, while being able to improve the end users' experiences. Previously, the spreadsheets would have to be checked out by each person who was working in that project, whereas now they can all access the project from wherever they are, and it also reduced the number of copies that were being saved locally back in the Excel days.

QuickBase has made it simpler for our company to provide real-time reporting of how projects are going, helping to forecast if additional resources are necessary to stay on target for completion, and it's made it simpler for larger teams to ensure the same work isn't accidentally completed twice through an automated assignment/checkout process several of our applications are utilizing.

We were already utilizing QuickBase pre-COVID, so thankfully by having the majority of our applications already in-production and being used by the company helped create a nearly seamless transfer when we went from a majority office presence over to the entire workforce becoming WFH in a very, very short amount of time. Now that the pandemic is officially over, it's allowed our users to continue using QB, regardless of where they're physically located. It's been a pivotal product to help our US operations continue to accurately manage clients needs with employees throughout the US as well as an India-based workforce that was recently created (within the last three years).

We have a vast array of customers, all of which use many of their own unique systems to get their jobs done. QuickBase is able to take all those very unique projects and help us to track them in a "one shop spot". It also allows us to take our very own internal complex workflows and keep better tabs on each one. The largest advantage we've recently noticed was the ability to have dashboards that can source their data from more than one app, making it simpler for our project management teams to see overall figures, rather than being stuck with a siloed view of only data from the same application the dashboard was built within.

Yes, our organization has been able to benefit from the rapid application capabilities that QuickBase offers to its customers. For example, we have several business units who are utilizing citizen developers to further enhance their BU's daily processes. Originally, QuickBase applications were being built and maintained by our Information Technology team, which often held up overall progress of these apps being built due to IT's available resources and time constraints. Now that the business units who delve primarily within QB have their own citizen developers available, they have been able to justify hiring more team members to keep up with the demands of executives and operations management. QuickBase has been able to empower our organization's business users by allowing them to make alterations and entirely new apps in short time, as opposed to enlisting the help of a standard development team to build these apps for them.

As long as the citizen developer is able to comprehend and retain knowledge, QuickBase development is usually relatively simple for new app builders to pick up on it. QuickBase also provides its own university program, which allows app builders to review the product's offerings, get a hands-on feel for what to expect when they begin building out their own applications and provides assessment/quizzes along the way to test your knowledge of the product. Our IT team is always available to help resolve issues and to help build out new applications to help ensure that the table structures make sense, but for the most part our citizen developers 'run the show' for their app. We do conduct reviews of apps either annually, or after significant app enhancements have been made to ensure that best practices are being followed and to help support scalability in the future.

I had created my first application around seven months after becoming more acclimated with QuickBase. I had done what was requested by the app owner back then, but as we all know, things change throughout the course of work. When the time came to begin to provide the additional users with a more customized user experience, I found it relatively simple to make the requested feature enhancements with them, as well as rebuild the existing reports to accommodate the changes. To be safe, I did use a copy of the production app as I was building the changes, made several adjustments along the way based off the feedback the primary end users provided to me. Once they were satisfied with how everything looked and felt in the copy, I replicated the changes within the production app, then cleansed and updated the necessary records. Overall, the changes were relatively simple to make, since QB specializes in the ability to make changes quickly and easily.

I wasn't involved with the purchasing process, only with ensuring it was a success when it was deployed to the masses.

I wasn't involved within the latest go around for purchasing Quickbase, but I believe we have an elevated level of support purchased to ensure our issues don't go unanswered for too long. Having that extra security of knowing we have access to higher tier support is a nicety, even though it comes at a higher cost.

I recall having a pressing issue with a user who couldn't sign into their system because of an authentication discrepancy between our active directory and what QB had for their account. It got handled within 30-35 minutes from when I submitted the ticket and marked its urgency rather higher, since that employee/user couldn't record their work or view what they were supposed to complete next.