Automating workflows is at the heart of solving problems with app building platforms like Quickbase. Business professionals have been pushing the envelope on creating complex business logic that matches their exact processes without writing code. And now, with Quickbase’s new automation capability, they can push that envelope a much greater distance than ever before.
I’m thrilled to introduce Quickbase Automations and doubly thrilled to do so surrounded by hundreds of passionate “Quickbasers” in Austin, Texas at EMPOWER, our fourth annual user conference. This capability enables you to create business rules with clicks, not code, so you can build dramatically more powerful Quickbase apps that solve unique problems in every part of your organization. You can now get Quickbase to do more things on a schedule and do multiple things in order automatically – without workarounds or writing code. This means less time spent on low-value work and more teams focused on the work that truly matters like raising the bar on customer experience and growing your business.
How Does Automations Work?
An automation represents a business rule that you define to automatically perform actions. It consists of a trigger and one or more actions.
The trigger is what starts your automation. It can be a change in your Quickbase app or a set schedule.
An action can add, modify, or delete a record. It can also move data across apps by running a table-to-table import that you previously created.
How Are Customers Using Automations?
With Automations, you have countless opportunities to automate your workflows. For example, you can automate the creation of new projects with a large number of steps, taking snapshots of sales data for the weekly sales trend report, or identifying VIP accounts based on deal amount and treating them preferentially.
This is how Chad of Projects Force, a technology services provider for the construction industry, describes their use of Automations in his own words:
“Quickbase gives us the power to formulate solutions for complex problems and build them in minutes. We manage real estate development projects that involve hundreds of residential units and a huge number of tasks are required to build all those units. Creating tasks in our Quickbase application used to take 30 minutes per unit but now with Automations, it happens automatically. This has freed our team to spend more time working with customers directly, helping us significantly improve our customer service.”
~ Chad Thomas, President of Sales and Service at Projects Force
Where Do I Begin?
You can access Automations from your app’s Settings page under Advanced Features.
If you need help getting started, check out Working with Automations, a 13-minute training video hosted at Quickbase University, that walks you through creating automatons. You can also consult the help documentation.
Want to see how far you can push the envelope and what workflows you can streamline with Automations? Just log in and build your first automation. I’d love to know what you think, please leave a comment below.
