The way you currently work? It doesn’t work.
The last two and a half years have seen an explosion of new technology, all aimed at improving efficiency, collaboration, and productivity. This is more than we’ve seen in our over 20 years in the marketplace. Yet, the more solutions businesses have, the more manual processes stack up to deal with them.
Whatever industry you’re in, think about how you work compared to three years ago. Does anything feel any easier to you? While complexity is continuing to rise, and the labor market shrinks, there is an imperative to handle more data, people, and systems effectively without creating siloes.
Look around—we’re seeing a productivity crisis. This is especially true in sectors that deliver complex portfolios of projects, like construction, real estate, energy, and manufacturing—projects that organizations across industries have to deal with. These challenges are the ones that have the most large, complicated, timebound projects with endless moving parts. Think of building a new 5G infrastructure—it involves technology, physical assets, and lots of coordination.
The result is the need to find a new way of getting work done. People have more on their plates, amid even more disruption than usual. And the work at hand is more complex—working with data from multiple systems, people from across your company, and even collaborators at other organizations.
Because of all this change, no single process is going to have the same set of requirements or specific needs every time. Until now, organizations have got away with working on spreadsheets or fitting core systems into their work, like jamming a square peg into a round hole. But the amount of necessary complexity makes that impossible today.
Take Foodstuffs New Zealand. Previously, their $3 billion real estate portfolio was causing issues across teams, with multiple teams working with separate sources of information. Could they possibly manage their critical, valuable assets with the wrong systems? No—they had to empower their teams with the right information and build a central source of truth. As a result, they are saving 25 cents on every dollar of capital expenses—enabling them to deliver projects an average of 5-8% under budget.
Where Collaborative Work Management falls short
As a result, there is a need to find a new type of platform that goes beyond the complexity we've seen in the past. It is no longer confined to the individual productivity needs of yesterday, nor the small team collaboration that many tools currently do so well. It is the cross-functional, dynamic programs that are the stickiest and hardest to solve, involving more systems, data, and teams than before.
What these challenges require is the right people to have the right information at the right time. Siloed teams, systems, and even companies need to be in lockstep. And innovators across your entire business need to manage their information and processes, while IT securely controls who sees and does what.
The simple productivity tools designed to enable collaborative work are great for individuals managing tasks, sharing and reviewing documents, and understanding progress at a high level. Similarly, collaborative work management (CWM) tools can improve the way you manage individual teams and projects. These fall short of what modern work needs, unfortunately. Despite the recent success of CWM platforms, companies delivering complex programs still find themselves looking for more.
What they are looking for is the biggest opportunity a company has for scale and growth: managing highly complex programs that impact your functions and departments across your business every day. The cross-functional supply chain management, the real estate portfolios that require collaboration, the building projects that include multiple departments. The big, sticky work that drives your success.
Empowering teams with no-code
To get across these complex operational processes and systems, standard technology won’t fit the bill. And investing in a new platform or tool for every single unique, complex project in your portfolio doesn’t make sense.
That’s where no-code comes in, unlocking the potential of your people and empowering teams to customize how they manage each of their projects—all while keeping the control in IT’s hands through dashboards and reports. It goes beyond the ability of a ‘super-spreadsheet.’ It gives business innovators the ability to build enterprise applications and integrations without code. At the same time, IT can retain control over who builds and sees what.
Imagine if you had 10 different systems that all have data relevant to a particular set of projects. This means 10 different sets of information, and at least 10 different ways of interpreting what’s actually happening. Effective collaboration is nearly impossible. Quickbase’s no-code platform simplifies this, letting you connect your existing technology and create a single place where your people can find exactly the information they need, from any system at any time – without the clutter.
A partner to tackle your most critical work
At Quickbase, we want to help you accomplish your goals – particularly the ones that drive the focus of your functions and departments. Our platform helps you address the challenges at this level: those that impact the most people and processes across your business, but are underserved by existing technology in the market. We believe that solvingthe critical challenges in this space will usher in a new era of productivity.
And we think we’re on to something here—with over 20 years’ experience and nearly 6,000 customers, we’ve been able to deliver incredible results for our business (including an over 20% growth rate year over year that’s helped us become a $200 million+ revenue business in 2022) and our customers. The more we see our customers succeed with their projects, from innovating prefabrication projects to managing complex order management, the more we feel confident in our vision.
We’re not concerned with being the best software in the current existing categories. In fact, there isn’t yet a category for that critical set of work that bridges your organization’s gaps. We’re more concerned with understanding the way modern work gets done, the gaps that a growing number of solutions creates, and filling those gaps. That starts with clarity on goals, the people best equipped to solve them, and the ways that everyone’s work can impact them. And then attacking that work, as we like to say, All Together Now.
The right tools will let you do your work. Connecting those tools and the people using them with Quickbase will truly power this new era of productivity.
