QuickBase - Rx for BI

We track products returned for failure analysis. Returned components are tracked from receipt to final reporting to the customer. Because many different support personnel are involved, our Quickbase application is important in making sure there is an orderly flow from start to finish and that nothing falls "between the cracks". All involved individuals have visibility to the progress of the component through the process and received automated email reminders when a specific action is required. Previously, this was "managed" in typical fashion with Excel spreadsheets and emails which, as we've seen time and again, is a recipe for failure.

The scope and sophistication of our application have increased over time. Yet, we maintain the ability to customize as required to better meet users' needs. I feel that, with a very modest resource commitment, we are able to quickly and with relative ease support user requests for enhanced features. Based on our learning, we typically make several significant enhancements per year with virtually no application downtime. The ability to grow the application in this way has has lead to significant improvements in application utility.

There is a certain commitment required to learn the basics of Quickbase. I have seen very non-technical people become proficient to the point of being able to create an application virtually on their own. It would be useful to have one technical lead to whom less experienced developers could turn, but not absolutely necessary. Online Quickbase support is excellent. Again, mostly it requires a willingness to tinker with the application to achieve some level of mastery.

In our application, it eventually became necessary to transition from a pull-down multi-choice text field to a list of choices in another table. This was necessary because there were values dependent on the multi-choice that also needed to be pulled into the form. This required that we set up a new table, create the necessary table-to-table relationships and modify the forms include the new "related" fields. We also had to copy the old multi-choice data into the "related" record ID field to update the data in previously created records. We've made several changes like this; in every case, preparation is the key to a smooth transition. Determine each change that needs to happen, decide the order of implementation, have a backup plan, backup the table in question and test, test, test, preferably over a weekend or during off-hours.