Migrating From MS Access to An Online Database: Formation Healthcare’s Story

June 25, 2009 at 11:40 am · Filed under Sponsored Post

Why Bringing Data Online Is Better For Business

If you haven’t read the post 6 Reasons to Move Your Data Online Now! - on how to facilitate communication, collaboration and productivity via an online database - it’s not too late to download the whitepaper and dig deeper into some of the reasons why businesses may want to consider moving their data online. Today, I’ll be sharing with you how and why Formation Healthcare recently migrated their data from MS Access to QuickBase, Intuit’s online database solution.

Assessing, analyzing and monitoring quality of regulatory measures in the nursing home industry is a process that Formation Healthcare knows well. They rely on surveys and certification processes to identify potential risks and currently monitor those risks for the lenders, investors and owners of 300 plus nursing homes across the country. As the company has grown, the spreadsheets they once used to manage this process and information were replaced with a flat database. Debra Rollins, Database Manager at Formation Healthcare, explained this flat database was eventually replaced with a complex, web-enabled ODBC database which served their information needs until that solution also recently became too limiting for the changing needs of Formation Healthcare, Debra and the team.

With 5 remote employees and 8 remote operators needing access to up to date reporting – Debra found that even though her MS Access database was web-enabled – she was still sending the team a new database app every time queries and reports were updated. Additionally, when sharing the reports/queries, there was a certain degree of risk involved in the process. Trissie Farr, VP of Formation Healthcare stated, “We wanted to protect the mechanics of our queries and formulas and with MS Access, we found that we had potential risk for ‘pirating’, utilizing that platform.” Debra further explained that even though the ODBC Access database was password protected and each form had additional read only / edit security, Access does not allow security for the modules which contain the security coding itself. Being in such a highly regulated industry, information accessibility and security were two important factors for Formation Healthcare.

So the search began for a secure, yet easily-accessible online database. Most of the solutions that Debra evaluated required her to convert her Access database data into a spreadsheet (csv. document) and then import it into the new system. For a simple application, that may have worked; but Debra’s application consisted of 30 plus tables and 17 relationships, with 11 of those relationships in one table. She simply didn’t have that kind of time to do it herself, so she kept looking. When evaluating QuickBase, she learned that Intuit offers an Access to QuickBase migration service* that did exactly what she was looking for. The Access to QuickBase migration took approximately 4-5 hours and was conducted by one of Intuit’s QuickBase Business Consultants. Since then, Debra and Trissie are becoming big fans of QuickBase - realizing the sheer power of QuickBase they are excited to continue customizing it and rolling it out to the rest of their organization.

My favorite quote from Debra was that “QuickBase has an extremely easy UI (user interface); however, it is truly deceiving and really is much more powerful than it initially appears. It’s like going from driving a Yugo to driving a Maserati! QuickBase is the Maserati!”

Intuit QuickBase

Get Customizable Web-Based Software and Get Productive: a 7 Tip Series

April 15, 2009 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Distributed Work, QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

We (Intuit QuickBase) recently wrote up some thoughts, compiled into a white paper, on seven ways you can improve team productivity with customizable web-based software. The first of those tips is shared below.

For the rest of them – about two a week - please visit the QuickBase blog and click on the industry trends category. Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”

Tip #1 - Stop the “spreadsheet shuffle” and start working better – together

There’s an old saying: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For many companies, the spreadsheet is the hammer they apply to any project. And just as a hammer is a poor way to measure dimensions or cut wood, the spreadsheet – though familiar – introduces more project management problems than it solves when you’re working with a team.

When you and your colleagues do the “spreadsheet shuffle,” your team choreography descends into chaos. Without a centralized location for all your project information – a place where individuals can update their pieces of information in real-time- you don’t have one version of the truth. Instead you’ve got spreadsheets and emails travelling around and potentially people working off of inconsistent/old information.

Spreadsheets hurt productivity in several ways. You waste time reconciling multiple document versions. There is a lack of adequate tracking and audit tools which make it nearly impossible to find errors. And, spreadsheet applications haven’t been designed to encourage and facilitate communication: they have no features for tracking progress, prompting activity or alerting team members to deadlines.

Emailing spreadsheets is a project work-around, not an effective means for managing work. The best alternative is an online project management application that centralizes project information, provides all team members with secure access to the information they need—whenever and wherever they need it—streamlines data gathering, tracking and communication, and makes it easy to stay on the same page and easy to monitor progress.

We recently asked a few QuickBase customers how they put a stop to the shuffle - check out their comments here.

One example: “We used to send these big spreadsheets as email attachments to the whole department on a reoccurring basis. Besides clogging up everyone’s inbox, we usually ended up referring to different versions once in a while, adding to the confusion. Another reason that pushed us into a better solution was that IT decided to strip our macro-based Excel files from the emails, sending us scrambling to find a solution around that new ‘policy’.”

Pretty neat, we think, right?

QuickBase

Two Webinars for the Coghead Community

March 2, 2009 at 1:57 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web Apps, Webinar

As Bill Ives mentioned in his previous post, the QuickBase team has put together a special offer for Coghead ‘refugees’ left in the lurch after Coghead and SAP decided to shut the existing service down. We think, of course, that QuickBase is the best online database out there, and can solve the needs of both Coghead customers and Coghead partners.

I know moving to a new solution is a tough process. To help with the transition, we are going to host two webinars focused on giving partners and customers the information they need to make the best decision for their business.

For Partners - we are doing a webinar on Tuesday March 3d, 2009 at 10am (PST)

For Customers - we are doing a webinar on Thursday March 5th, 2009 at 10am (PST)

For more information, and to sign up for the webinars, please check out our blog post  - http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2009/02/26/quickbase-to-present-to-coghead-community/

QuickBase

5 “sure thing” Technology Predictions for 2009 (sure to be wrong!)

January 9, 2009 at 5:44 pm · Filed under Sponsored Post

1)      Massive consolidation of technology startups, acquisitions galore – VC funding becomes incredibly selective and lots of solid technology startups, with no paying customers and revenue streams, turn to acquisition as an exit strategy.  Similar to mid-1999, some of the big players, go on a shopping spree – unlike ’99, the valuation are quite reasonable.

2)      Twitter explodes…in a good way – Twitter is on the verge of insane growth.  Personal blogging slows considerably as people meld blogging and social networking  and simply turn to Twitter.  They break 50 million users in 2009 and become THE place for corporate brands to maintain their reputations.  Funds get pulled out of Second-life (and banner ads too) as companies staff “twitter-watchers” to make sure they are on top of any feedback (positive or negative).  The race for the best twitter apps continue.

3)      The mobile industry is going to be boring – Not that stuff won’t happen, but nothing “major” is going to rock the industry (i.e. iPhone).  There will be good advances in technology and finally a shakedown towards development standards.  There will be more cool iphone apps but for the most part, the iphone won’t take over the world and app developers can’t monetize other business mobile apps, so 2009 will be more about foundation building than breathtaking announcements.

 4)      Adobe Air apps rock the world – Tweetdeck is just the start.  As people get used to “conveniently connected” desktop apps, developers will take Air to the next level and build some really stunning and highly distributed apps.

5)      Traditional Small Businesses move to SaaS in droves – The typical small business is still pretty old-school – Running their business on some combination of E-mail, QuickBooks and spreadsheets.  But SaaS costs are coming down and the technology is getting much more interesting.  2009 holds employees demanding on-line payroll, customers who are on twitter and need a response, vendors who don’t want to fax you documents – there’s nowhere to hide.  This is the year the average small business jumps two feet into technology and developers will be there to respond – integrated data, drop-dead simple apps, solid value…We’re going to see SMB SaaS adoption skyrocket.

Thoughts?  What else is SURE to happen in 2009?

QuickBase

Does Your Company Suffer From ‘Sneakernet’?

December 16, 2008 at 3:54 pm · Filed under Sponsored Post

A Customer Story

‘Sneakernet’ is a term that I was first introduced to during a conversation with one of our customers  – Ed Metz, vice president and director of technical services at Robert Berning Productions, a creative communications and marketing solutions agency. As he explained, back in 2003 the company with a total of 13 employees at the time was suffering from ’sneakernet’.

So what is it? In Ed’s words it was the very manual process of walking down the hall to pick up a form, fill it out, go downstairs, deliver the order to the production staff, and then walk back upstairs, bringing one copy to the department supervisor and finally one copy to bookkeeping? You get the point.

This process had been in place for several years and was causing problems: often there was incomplete information on the form; a rush order could end up at the bottom of the stack or even lost; as orders were revised, other copies of the form would then be outdated. And forget about finding an old order with valuable information from a couple years back. Also, there was a tendency to issue verbal orders, simply because the paperwork was so cumbersome.

Ed knew that he needed to bring order to this antiquated process and had researched many software options for automating the work order system, including traditional database management and hosted workgroup application software. Ease of use was important, since Metz is a filmmaker and photographer by trade — not an IT professional.

One of my favorite quotes from him: “QuickBase made it easy for me to do what I wanted to with the software without having a lot of technical expertise. Compared to Microsoft Access or Filemaker, the ability to set up multiple related tables is a snap; QuickBase does much of the work for me. If I do have a question about a formula or report design, the active online Community Forum is a great resource.”

Since 2003,  Robert Berning Productions has doubled its revenue, grown to 20 employees, saved 50 staff hours per month in staff meetings, reclaimed four staff hours per month by eliminating manual work order distribution, eliminated incidences of misplaced or incomplete work orders, spent less time processing work orders and had more resources focused on client work with the help of QuickBase.

QuickBase

“Closing the Last Mile”: An apps marketplace for small business

November 18, 2008 at 3:52 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Sponsored Post

If you’re a small business today, the breadth and quality of software and services available to help you run your business is limited. You just don’t get the same offerings that are available to the Fortune 1,000 crowd. Why is this? It’s just too darn expensive. We hear about infrastructure companies that have a “last mile” problem – as in – I can get the data to the town but getting it into each individual home is too costly.  Well, the same thing is true for the small business community.

Three things scare developers away from serving the small business market:

1) Price sensitivity: The value of a dollar is not created equal – small businesses need to see value and need to see it fast! Offerings will need to be priced accordingly.

2) Making it work with other apps: Software providers selling to the enterprise can send in swat teams to perform backend integration – who can afford to do that for a 5 person business?

3) Customer “reachability”: With roughly 26 million small businesses in the US alone, the market potential is enormous, but how do I reach them without a national TV campaign or shelf space at Staples?

We’ve seen this dilemma played out over the last few years. Millions of Small Businesses wanting more choices that fit their needs. And thousands of developers with expert domain knowledge on how to solve their needs, but no confidence they can do it and make a return on their investment.

Enter the Intuit Partner Platform – matchmaker extraordinaire, we believe. By leveraging the roles we’ve played in serving millions of small businesses with our own technology development over the last 25 years, we’re in a unique position to bring these two groups together. So how does it work?

For Developers: We offer a Platform as a Service that allows them to quickly and easily build a Software as a Service (SaaS) application for specific small business needs. We host the application/service, take care of the billing, user management, and much of the other stuff that makes SaaS expensive for the developer. In addition, we offer the developer one-click data integration with an SMB’s back-office – which is almost always their QuickBooks data. We handle the data synchronization, security and storage of the data, and free up the developer to apply their expertise to solving the customer’s problem. And lastly, we put their app in a marketplace and drive traffic through our marketing channels. We have 25 million employees in our QuickBooks customers and some good experience reaching the SMB market.

For Small Businesses: They get a single marketplace to discover and use a wide array of applications to help their business — and they can be confident that these new apps and their data is on a platform they trust.

So how does this all come together? Here’s an example: yesterday Universal Mind launched an application on the platform that allows small businesses to geographically visualize their customer data (check out this CNET story on the news). The app brings in a company’s customer data from QuickBooks and allows a small business to manipulate the data to glean valuable business intelligence. With map overlays of census data such as median house-hold income, SMB’s can now be far more intelligent in their business decisions. (Where are my best customers coming from? Where should I consider expanding? etc…)

Technology like this was previously unavailable to the small business community. But through the power of Software-as-a-Service, data integration, and customer accessibility, both the small business and the developer win, in our humble opinion.

QuickBase

Out of this Galaxy - Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy

November 14, 2008 at 2:51 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Reviews, Sponsored Post

Luke Winter and Tristan Kampman bought Granola Galaxy 3 years ago when the company served less than 100 customers direct, mostly in its Northern California home market.  They liked the product, the brand and the potential opportunity for growth.

And grow it did.  Galaxy has added over 1,000 stores since Luke and Tristan showed up.  For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information.  It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all.  Out of frustration, Luke commented, “It doesn’t matter how good you are in Excel, it’s just not meant to be used as a database.” Yet so many people are using and abusing spreadsheets in this capacity. Luke and Tristan set out on a search for an appropriate database/CRM tool. Their requirements for the solution were that it must be customizable and flexible.

‘We considered Filemaker and Access; but knew it would require a lot of work to get started and we didn’t have that time and energy to put towards it. And Salesforce wasn’t quite customizable enough for our needs,’ said Luke.

So they decided on QuickBase and have been using it since January 2008 for their customer service management needs – specifically tracking the status of customers, where customers are located, what product the customers carry and how much they have in inventory at any given time, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. Luke said, ‘QuickBase helps us provide a level of customer service and follow-up comparable to that of much larger companies.’

Even though Galaxy Granola is a small operation today, they are serving large customers across the US like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Albertson’s. They’ve got big plans for growth and that includes increased usage of QuickBase over time. As their business needs and processes evolve, QuickBase applications can evolve with them.

Luke commented, ‘QuickBase is a customizable online database that can be used for a variety of business functions. We really value the flexibility the product has to offer. QuickBase has a huge advantage there. We can adapt and make changes on the fly.’

QuickBase