At Quickbase, we’ve seen customers of all sizes and types use our platform to do more of what matters in their organizations. From simple project tracking to highly complex systems that run the entire business, the flexibility of Quickbase opens the door to almost unlimited use cases.
That said, the companies that drive huge ROI from Quickbase tend to fall into one of five categories:
1. Aggregating insights across systems
Quickbase is great for collecting data from disparate systems into an easy-to-use database with built-in reporting tools. Many customers use Quickbase to centralize data from several previously disparate systems in order to drive new business insights.
For example, Norwegian Cruise Lines manages cruise ships in the hospitality industry. The company had a lot of data in siloed, core transactional systems, like dining reservations, ship check-ins, and POS systems. These siloed systems hindered land-based operations managers who were responsible for restocking inventory on demand. The lack of data integration between the systems also made it difficult for marketing managers to understand how a particular new campaign was performing. The only workaround at the time was to capture and share information via spreadsheets, phone calls, and text documents. It was a slow process that typically delivered a “full picture” weeks after the voyage was complete.
With Quickbase, the company created a data collection engine that broke down the siloes of information specifically between ERP, POS, and Marketing systems. Inventory and marketing managers, equipped with an integrated view of these systems, could now anticipate exactly when, for example, to order new linens and tablecloths for their restaurants or decide whether to expand that new craft beer promotion they were testing. And they could do all of this in real-time. That meant adjustments to improve efficiency and enhance customer experiences were in place to optimize for the next voyage.
2. Meeting high demand for everyday apps
Demand for technology solutions for organizations is higher than ever, and internal IT pro developers simply can’t keep up. Using Quickbase is a great way to offload much of the demand for “every day” apps and free up the IT team to focus on more strategic work.
For example, Ascension is in the healthcare field and dedicated to quality care. The organization uses Quickbase to meet its incredibly high demand for apps ranging in scope from business critical to everyday administration. In fact, hundreds of no-code app builders within the organization use Quickbase to build and roll out up to 40 apps per month, with 4,000 apps in total so far. The kind of apps built include a patient appointment scheduler, product tracker for everyday items like test tubes or surgical gloves, and even nurse training or tuition reimbursement apps.
Since these apps don’t contain sensitive information, the business can quickly build and manage them on their own as required, with right-sized governance. This self-service approach also helps Ascension free up its IT department to spend more time on strategic multi-year initiatives like ERP systems or working with highly regulated Electronic Medical Record systems.
3. Improving the Usability of Legacy Systems
Especially at large organizations, core technologies are often as inflexible as they are irreplaceable. For many Quickbase customers, our platform provides a bridge between highly complex core systems and the end users at the front lines.
For example, Metso is an industrial equipment company operating within the oil and gas industry. Its older transactional supply chain management and product data management systems had become impediments to operations managers on the front lines who were responsible for tracking orders, inventory, and engineering change requests through the manufacturing process. In addition, communications on priority orders were getting buried in emails and voicemails. This resulted in highly paid senior engineers walking around the factory floor carrying clipboards to get sign offs on engineering change requests.
With Quickbase, Metso is now on the cutting-edge of digital transformation and saving about $1M a year annually. Not only has the company eliminated the data chaos from thousands of spreadsheets, emails, and post-it notes, but it has also built connections from legacy ERP and supply chain management systems back to Quickbase as a control center (or system of operations) to respond faster to changing customer requirements.
4. Filling Platform Gaps Fast
Many companies rely on expensive platforms such as Salesforce to build extensions to mission-critical business applications. In many cases, however, building some of those extensions in Quickbase is faster, easier, and highly economical.
For example, CCI is a provider in the network solutions space. The company had a number of new projects spinning up rapidly and required a central system to enable project managers to more easily manage revenue and customer feedback for those projects. And while it was technically feasible to build this functionality into Salesforce, decision makers realized it was going to be too costly and take too long. They would also need to bring in additional professional developers with special skills (like APEX) to do it. The IT team was already at maximum capacity to not only fulfill these rising project backlogs but also accommodate rapid turnaround times on application updates.
CCI turned to Quickbase to facilitate project buildout in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. This strategy leveraged a partnership between the IT Data Services team, for systems integrated SFDC with Quickbase, and Quickbase business builders (called “Ninjas” at CCI) who address their own Salesforce requests by creating and maintaining apps themselves. Many customers are doing the same to extend projects from other core cloud or on-premise systems—filling these gaps, faster, cheaper—and with a platform trusted by IT.
5. A Platform for Organizational Agility
Organizations that invest in wide deployments of Quickbase see the highest returns. At many companies, Quickbase is more than just a bridge or gap-filler — it’s a strategic platform for continuous improvement, empowering the business to adjust and flex to changing business conditions.
For example, Riverbed is in the tech space and helps improve application performance across wide area networks. The company started using Quickbase for contact management within their PMO and then quickly extended it to their Revenue Accounting team to streamline and automate a monthly general ledger and journal entry reconciliation process. Previously they had to create a hardcopy in a new thick paper binder every month for this. Through champion evangelism within Riverbed, Quickbase was quickly adopted by the Customer Support group to assist them in running a more efficient help desk.
Today the company boasts a Quickbase ecosystem of 47 interconnected apps where data easily flows between those apps and processes are automated across departments. And the benefits have been significant. For instance, when the finance team connected their data with the information security team via Quickbase, they ended up automating their monthly financial close process faster than they ever had before and in compliance with their corporate policies. For them, that truly represented organizational agility.
Like Riverbed, we often see our customers start and succeed with Quickbase in one department and then roll it out to others. The more collaboration and automation that occurs between these departments, the more value Quickbase delivers to their business. In fact, we see a strong correlation between the spread of Quickbase across departments and a significant rise in efficiency, profitability, competitiveness, and growth.
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