Item: Quickbase
Rating: 3
Author: Andrew Cooke

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

QuickBase is currently being used as tool on tablets for operators on the floor to access information concerning different job orders. It allows users to access, modify, and review process checklists pertaining to Quality Control for the company. The QuickBase application used was created by the Quality Control team, and is maintained by the same. I looked at using QuickBase to create a custom time-study application for use in validating process times, but was unable to get the software to do what I needed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

QuickBase has an easy to use GUI, which allows users to understand intuitively what the application does.
QuickBase is very adaptable and modular.
QuickBase connects well with other software, allowing easy ports of data.

Cons

Programming. I don't know if it's possible to set up user defined formulae to take input and calculate an output on the fly. I searched for some sort of similar functionality within the program, but couldn't figure out how to get even a simple input box to take the input, run it through a function, and display the output in a box next to it.
Coming from an Engineering/Programming background, the GUI for development was difficult to use sometimes. I'm sure it's very user friendly for people who are not comfortable with coding, but it felt restrictive when I wanted to change some of the functionality.

Alternatives Considered

I develop my own support functions for myself and other personnel by coding in VBA mostly (as it interfaces nicely with Excel). Excel seems to be the preferred universal file type, as most people are comfortable with it. Coding functions into Excel and storing the data in a spreadsheet is somewhat inefficient when trying to do data analysis, but fortunately, Excel can export data tables to more commonly used (but harder to read) data types (CSV, etc), for use with advanced statistical suites (e.g. R, SAS, etc). However, expanding this to a smart phone or tablet is difficult, as VBA (and Excel in general) doesn't play nice with the Android/Apple software.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited:
Checklists, simple data entry, data retrieval/validation.
Less Appropriate:
Custom generated tables based on user selections. I don't need another glorified stopwatch, but want a program that can record the current time when I hit a button and let me add different modifiers to it to record the actual man-hours spent on different parts of a process. I can manually calculate everything in Excel, but want a program that automates it for me (or that I can program to automate for me).

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