Building an idiot proof app
April 14, 2017
Building an idiot proof app
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
It's currently being used or being developed for use by our specialty services - rigging is online now. Power distribution has been created and will come online this quarter, photography is online, and CSN is next.
- Easily customizable
- Formulas are similar to Excel
- Good support team
- If you don't know the programming language, it's sometimes hard to find answers.
- The text to currency or text to date thing annoys me.
- It'd be cool to rand a little more - fonts, images, logos, that kind of thing
I believe we have. I have a background in many other CRMs (TMA, Oracle, Ultipro, etc) that I've set up for companies such as Cirque Du Soleil. My biggest problem has been finding people with a similar background who can develop the program for the other teams - that's not been easy and as such, I've been stuck developing for multiple divisions. However, it's completely streamlined our division's records, accounts, etc.
TMA, Oracle, Ultipro, SAP and other custom built CRMs. I like quickbase best because it's customizable. It's easily customizable rather than having extra fields or trying to fit your data into someone else's system.
This has been a problem. I've ended up building the database for three of our other divisions because no one has the capabilities to do this. The last division is client networking services. They are essentially an IT division, so they understood it immediately but this was far beyond the majority of experience most of our users had. That said, my MFA definitely prepared me for this as using project and access were regularly used but I'm the only one in our divisions who use them.
- 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 tracked all of our data on multiple Excel sheets. We should have been using Access and Project, but we weren't because those programs require a higher level understanding than the majority of the team had and aren't particularly "client facing". To be frank, we needed to create an idiot-proof system as our divisions are highly technical, but not highly computer savvy, if that makes sense. We were finally able to unite all of our data across the country so it's easily accessible. Which is a first in the last decade.
This hasn't ever worked for me. Our needs are odd because we are a business that operates within partner businesses, with multiple locations and multiple customers. I have successfully stolen portions of apps like tables, functionality, etc. But typically our table to table relationship needs make it difficult to use other apps.