Average Joe builds a Quickbase App......and it's easy.
Updated April 10, 2017
Average Joe builds a Quickbase App......and it's easy.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
Quick background - John Crane is an international business with many locations all over the world. I work at the location in Tulsa, Oklahoma which at this time is a little autonomous from the corporate structure of John Crane. To solve some of our problems 4 years ago we sought out a system like Quickbase and ultimately decided on Quickbase.
That said we use Quickbase at our location of approximately 100 people across the entire building. From order processing and data management to quality reports. It has worked for us so well that we have hosted many other John Crane locations including Corporate headquarters for demonstrations of its success here.
- Versatility - The best aspect of Quickbase I find is its versatility. When describing Quickbase to people I often refer to it as a "sandbox" program. Meaning that it is extremely versatile and can do most anything a company would need, you just need to create the App the way you want.
- User Friendly - Since it is extremely customizable it is also possible to set it up to be very user friendly. Some programs take a good amount of time to learn, but with Quickbase's customizable format it can be set up in a very initiative way that makes it easy to use.
- Power - For a program that allows the individual company to build it as they see fit, it is extremely powerful in its performance.
- For the way we use it here a "split screen" aspect would be a welcome availability. There are times when being able to view information from different tabs under one App would be nice.
- Single button application of standard features. The possibilities of Quickbase are very broad, but some features would be nice if it was a simple follow the prompt set up. Example: You want a task generated to this person when you select this answer in a field on the table side. A button that would allow a person to select that field and say "create a task to this person when the answer to this field is......." Just simple little things to help streamline the management and creation of the App for the App Manager. For a person that can't dedicate time to learning all of the possibilities this would be helpful.
- Better graph generation capabilities would also be an improvement. Do they need to be as versatile as Execl's, no. At my company we do find ourselves exporting the data into Excel often in order to generate more complex graphs though.
In this company we have benefited greatly from Quickbase's versatility to improve our response time and it is certainly easier than our previous methods.
I have not had the opportunity to evaluated any other products in depth enough to comment.
The difficulty of building the program really depends on the needs of the person/company. From a knowledge base though, Excel and the various programming statements that are possible would be an asset since Quickbase's "programming" functions very similarly. I have run into some features that I would like to build in that are possible within the program, but based upon the information that I received from the online support the technically expertise of programming (not excel, but I believe was coding) is about my head. So like I said, the program has a huge amount of possibilities, but the person's knowledge of programming is a factor in it's capabilities.
- 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 achieved all that we initially wanted from Quickbase. Before Quickbase we had issues collaborating between all of the various departments on jobs that were coming and jobs that were being processed through the company. This was causing delays, mistakes, and lost time, which in turn was causing our customers to be unhappy with us. Quickbase alleviated all of these issues and allowed us to show a marked improvement in our deliverables, and quality of the deliverables.
As the primary Administrator of Quickbase here I am often "improving" our Quickbase Application. While there was a learning curve in the beginning since I am almost fully self taught. Changes now, more often than not are simple and I understand what will happen when I make changes.