Brown Machine Group—now known as BMG—is a manufacturing company that builds the machinery behind products we all recognize: from red plastic cups to chicken containers and berry boxes. Headquartered in Michigan, BMG operates with a lean IT staff supporting four locations across the U.S. and Canada.
When IT Director Mike Brady joined BMG, he immediately saw the opportunity to eliminate inefficiencies and cost—eventually including Salesforce.
| Before Quickbase | With Quickbase |
|---|---|
| Salesforce was $78k/year | BMG Hub in Quickbase saves them $55k for CRM use |
| Email-based engineering requests | App with assignment logic and capacity tracking |
| Manual sales reporting | Dashboards auto-populated for weekly meetings |
Meet Mike Brady: Longtime Builder, Lean Team Leader
Mike’s relationship with Quickbase goes back to the early 2000s, well before his time at BMG. At a previous company, he discovered Quickbase as a way to track field inventory—and never looked back. Now, as the IT Director at BMG, he manages 350 devices, 30 servers, and countless user needs across the company… with a two-person IT team.
“My default answer at this point is, ‘Well, let's create that in Quickbase,’” said Mike. “It’s my default piece of software for pretty much everything that's not like photo editing or video editing.”
The Challenge: Salesforce Was Costly, Rigid, and Underused
BMG’s previous owners implemented Salesforce because it seemed like a safe choice. The result: a complex, expensive system that didn’t work for how BMG operated—and required outside consultants to manage.
“Salesforce, for all their marketing of ‘you don’t need IT’… it’s really just someone else's IT that you need,” Mike said. “It was difficult to manage and quite expensive.”
| Salesforce was costing BMG $78,000/year for roughly 35 users |
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Replacing Salesforce with Quickbase
When BMG’s Chief Commerical Officer asked Mike for help selecting a new CRM, he knew exactly what to do. He quickly spun up a prototype CRM in Quickbase—based on a template app—and retooled it to match their existing Salesforce setup. After a few demos, BMG’s commercial leadership was sold.
When the Salesforce contract abruptly ended, Mike and a colleague pulled all their data and had a working Quickbase app up in just a couple of weeks. “It allowed our people to continue to use the data from Salesforce, even though it wasn’t the new thing yet. This bought us time to finish the final CRM we were building.”
By September, BMG launched what they now call BMG Hub—a full CRM replacement that’s grown into much more.
The Results: Cost Savings and a Custom Hub for the Business
“A full year of Salesforce was costing us in the neighborhood of $78,000,” Mike shared. “We just did our Quickbase renewal at $46,000—including some additional services. Even if you look at half of that being for CRM, you’re looking at a CRM cost of about $23,000.”
That’s over $55,000 a year in savings, just for the CRM component.
Beyond savings, BMG now runs critical processes on Quickbase that they couldn’t easily build or afford in Salesforce.
“After replicating our Salesforce processes in Quickbase, the next phase of work truly began,” said Mike. “Our management team pushed us to prioritize the customer experience as we continued to expand Quickbase’s capabilities. The result was the BMG Hub—a centralized portal for the entire company."
With the Quickbase-powered BMG Hub, users can
- View all related data, including installed equipment, service tickets, call reports, and quotes, all seamlessly connected.
- Have visibility into engineering workloads, technician assignments, and sales representatives’ travel plans.
- Deliver more informed and responsive service, fulfilling BMG’s commitment to mutual success with their customers.
We're doing things in BMG Hub that either we’d have to pay more for in Salesforce, or they just wouldn’t exist unless we did massive customization.
Building a Culture of Citizen Development
Mike is Quickbase’s primary evangelist at BMG; but he’s not doing it alone. He’s mentoring teammates like Lynn, a co-admin of BMG Hub, and guiding leaders across departments to build their own apps.
“We built in change requests so people can submit changes right within the app,” Mike explained. “I’ve got our engineering manager learning how to use Quickbase, a quality and safety person building inspection workflows… I’m just trying to create power users.”
I would definitely encourage anybody using Salesforce—or anything like it—to look at Quickbase. You don’t need a full-time person just to deal with changes like you do with Salesforce. With Quickbase, you add just the features you really need. And that makes it the best option, in my opinion, for anything that’s database-driven.
