Quickbase: The Low-Code Platform to Manage Manufacturing

Please introduce yourself and your role at Quickbase

I am Director at Quickbase, overseeing the company’s Customer Solutions Team (CST). The CST consists of subject matter experts (SME) with extensive backgrounds in helping customers scale their Quickbase solutions, especially in manufacturing and construction. That industry and customer experience is instrumental in our development of pre-built manufacturing solutions, called Pro Apps, that address many common challenges including Operations Management, Safety Compliance, Quality Adherence, and Machine maintenance and reporting.

Can you please give me an overview of Quickbase’s services and why they are beneficial to manufacturers?

Quickbase is an AI-powered software application platform for work management in complex industries, including manufacturing and construction. It combines AI and low code/no code technology to bring together people, data, and processes onto a single platform. This makes it easier to manage work across the company. For an industry like manufacturing, where operational efficiency and safety is critical, Quickbase minimises administrative overhead, mitigates operational risks, and provides clear project visibility.

In simpler terms, Quickbase provides the ability for an operator, supervisor, or general manager to easily navigate and review operational data and KPIs without having to spend hours manipulating Excel and pasting into PowerPoint, for example. This lost productivity time, a.k.a., “grey work,” costs manufacturers 10-15 hours a week of employee productivity, on average. Instead of implementing and improving processes and performing other meaningful, revenue-generating work, employees are downloading cs files. Quickbase eliminates grey work.

How critical is work management to manufacturing today?

Work management is the most critical piece and it is often missing in manufacturing. Think about all the different work management challenges facing manufacturers today. The labour shortage and skills gap immediately come to mind. These issues are often siloed and left to human resources to manage. Now, go up a level and consider the impact of labour across the company. On the plant floor, a supervisor is handling issues from labour to vacation scheduling to sick time and more. If the supervisor doesn’t have a view into labour across the company, they are siloed, missing information to effectively do their job.

If the information needs to be tracked down, that wastes time and stalls production, i.e., the Gray Work example. In this common scenario, the only thing that ties it all together is the production supervisor or the superintendent, and it makes their life difficult. This is why work management, and the connected worker, is critical to manufacturers today.

Despite having automation and an abundance of technology tools, it is harder to get work done because employees are chasing information from different people across multiple systems. To fix this critical work management problem, we need to connect data, systems, and people across the organisation. This is what a manufacturing work management platform can do; eliminate those silos and create an orchestrated workplace from the manufacturing floor to the back office.

How do you provide more value by being a no-code, cloud-based platform?

You get value in a couple of different ways. First is through mobility. A cloud-based platform allows you to perform checklists, manufacturing lookups and bill of materials all through your mobile device, empowering the worker that is rarely sitting at a desk. To that connected worker at their desk, a no-code cloud-based platform is extremely valuable because they don’t have to go back to their desktop, interrupt the workflow, log in to a system and report up to get a supervisor to look at it. They can do it all through an automated workflow.

Since it’s no-code, there are a lot of work processes easily improved without having to call IT to get involved. With no-code, you can circumvent all that red tape in making improvements to processes by building it yourself. This is all without creating information silos because everything is centralised on a work management platform easily accessible through the cloud.

What are the biggest challenges you see with manufacturers' approach to projects and how do you advise them to approach them?

One of the biggest challenges I see among manufacturers of all sizes, managing scopes that vary from simple to complex, is the ability to get every stakeholder aligned on a project.

 Think about the impact of a design or a timing change or a new safety protocol. Even an incremental change can have a significant impact. If the changes aren’t coordinated and transparent throughout the company, you will have delays, safety risks and cost overruns.

To overcome this challenge, many manufacturers today are decreasing their tech stacks and streamlining their digital platforms. Before doing this, they should take a good, hard look at how many disparate workflows they have. Get them all on a whiteboard and they will see how many different data sources are housed in those workflows, including those which are standalone or require a human to manage.

 As they go through the workflows, every time they see a data set that can be incorporated into another data set, circle it in green. For those data sets with an Excel sheet between them or that require a human to manage, circle it in red. What will end up happening is they will see a list of opportunities to decrease the digital stack by integrating the data sets in green and creating new automated processes to replace the workflows circled in red. When you integrate data sets and consolidate your tech stack on a work management platform, you reduce technical debt and streamline workflows.

How has Quickbase worked with manufacturers like NSK to enhance their manufacturing strategy?

NSK, a precision bearings manufacturer, is a great example of performance efficiency gains using Quickbase. Another manufacturer that comes to mind is Daifuku Intralogistics. As the world’s largest material handling supplier, Daifuku enables manufacturers across aviation, automotive, cleanrooms, and electronics to move materials from manufacturing to distribution safer, faster, and more affordably.  

In Daifuku’s business, change is constant. Still, any time change is introduced into a production system, it can be daunting. Yet the one change that has the biggest impact on customers, and the one that keeps them up at night, is equipment maintenance.

This is because preventative and reactive job site maintenance requires regular updates to software, staffing changes, schedule changes, planned shutdowns, etc. It is a balancing act between digital solutions and physical assets. When changes occur, they must be effectively communicated to employees, partners, and other key stakeholders throughout the supply chain so they can properly prepare. If all those various systems aren’t connected, it creates manual duplication of efforts, making it difficult to know if the underlying information is accurate. A lack of transparency into changes can have a massive ripple effect on the entire manufacturing and distribution process.

To avoid this, Daifuku uses a work management platform approach to automate the process of communicating change. Let’s say there is a mechanical, electrical, or software-related change on the horizon; they can automatically inform the stakeholders that the change is most likely to impact with easily understood specific instructions, so the customer has ample time to prepare. By bringing tools, apps, and information sources together Daifuku keeps customers calm and easily manages change.

Daifuku currently has hundreds of employees using a work management platform and anticipates the number of users will reach thousands. The platform is intuitive to use for all those people, across diverse levels of understanding of technology. This results in customers having trust that Daifuku Intralogistics America will keep their equipment up to date and do so in a way that will be as minimally disruptive as possible.

Do you have any further case studies you’d like to share about how you’ve helped manufacturers?

There are lots of other cases where a work management platform makes sense for manufacturers. For example, if you need to connect information from an MRP, ERP or MES system, a work management system can support this while also extending the capabilities of your existing systems. You can bring together all your information sources, such as shop floor management, bill of materials, order workflows, and safety management to keep everybody on the same page.

For example, a press engineering and automotive parts manufacturer takes their Bill of Materials and order workflow and extends it on a work management platform. Extending the capabilities of their systems allows customers to have greater transparency in processes. This includes production rates, where the parts are in transit all the way through to the dock. This is a huge cost savings because you aren’t forced to do hotshot trucking, a specialised type of trucking for urgent deliveries and expedited shipments. If a shipment is going to be delayed, there is enough transparency throughout the process that allows each stakeholder in the supply chain to proactively respond instead of hastily reacting.

Any final thoughts on the importance of keen software and data management to manufacturing?

Manufacturing has an incredible opportunity with artificial intelligence and machine learning insights. When you use a work management platform to bring together your data sources, you really open the doors for making your company more competitive for the future. If you are not taking the steps with data management and a cloud-based infrastructure where you can bring in AI, you may find yourself out in the cold sooner than you think.

Making this shift now is as important as W. Edwards Deming was to the automotive industry in the 1970s. While Ford didn’t embrace his theories on quality management and statistical process control, Toyota and Honda did. It revolutionised manufacturing quality, enabling Toyota and Honda to gain a significant competitive advantage and the rest, as they say, is history.

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