VeilSun Blog

How well did your last compliance audit go? Chances are, it didn’t go as smoothly as you’d like. Without an exceptional system in place, they almost never do.

When it comes time for an audit or certification, what’s your process? Is it a seemingly endless flurry of email and spreadsheets? Or is it a managed, secured and vetted process that saves time, energy and money? Our guess is, it’s the former. And that’s what makes any audit such a painful prospect.

Regardless of your organization and what type of audit you’re facing (whether it’s HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC1, SOC2, PCI, or any number of others), it’s an enormous and cumbersome task. In an ideal world, you’d have a system in place for continuous compliance, which would make audits infinitely less painful. But if you don’t, then the inevitable scramble is frustrating, time-consuming and costly.

All too often, GRC compliance becomes a complete nightmare of spreadsheets and emails. The process for many organizations is clunky at best and totally disorganized at worst. But it doesn’t have to be! Continuous tracking with automated workflows can eliminate the hassle of audit preparation and save your organization significant amounts of time and money.

To be well-prepared for an audit requires attention to workflow. So much has to be done to every specific piece of evidence, it’s no wonder that things frequently fall through. Each piece has to be requested, assigned, tracked, provided, vetted and reviewed, assembled and provided to the requestor… and trying to manage all of this via email inevitably complicates the process beyond measure.

Continuous tracking with VeilSun’s compliance system, on the other hand, will make your compliance less painful and vastly more efficient. Here are 6 benefits of an automated workflow tool for continuous compliance tracking.

There have been several blogs that have covered what pull planning is, how it works for construction, and firsthand accounts of how the last planner system works in practice. This blog will continue the series by addressing common misconceptions of digital pull planning and outlining its distinct advantages compared to traditional pull planning.

Making it in today’s fast-paced business climate means aligning yourself with the right partners. You need partners that can help you leverage technology in innovative ways that can drive your efficiency while also generating synergy to deliver mutual success. With its low-code, scalable platform, Quick Base enables partnership like this like never before. Whether wanting to become a partner that can design and build applications or needing to find a partner that can help customize your existing applications, Quick Base is the conduit you’re looking for.

For construction companies, keeping the work flowing is critical to every project’s success. That’s why there’s always such a premium placed on quality project management tools. And, although a lot of construction companies rely on the traditional method of sticky note pull planning, VeilSun has found a better way. This blog will give a brief summary of what pull planning is, why it’s so great for construction, and why QLean from VeilSun can be such a perfect option for taking your pull planning to another level. (There's a really amazing white paper at the QLean link above that you won't want to miss out on.)

What is Pull Planning?
In construction, much of the work is dependent on specific jobs being finished before the next phase can be completed, and these jobs are often done by a variety of different trades that have to be coordinated effectively. Simply stated, pull planning allows you to begin at the end and work back through each key stage. And because pull planning includes all of your relevant experts in the process, it helps you to quickly identify the true dependencies and plan accordingly.

A typical pull planning workflow looks like this: using different color sticky notes, each trade creates a stack or chute of tasks necessary to complete their steps in a project. All the trades then come together and start planning backward from the final phase of the project, placing their notes in relation to each other and identifying true dependencies. Once a linear order of tasks is established, the schedule is then consolidated in the most compact, efficient way possible, creating “pulls” that are then ported onto a calendar.

Why Pull Planning for Construction?
Instead of relying on a single Project Manager to design and implement a schedule, pull planning brings together all of your stakeholders to collaboratively plan the schedule, ensuring no tasks get overlooked.

Most importantly, pull planning maximizes efficiency in your project schedule by providing every team member with clear steps to follow to accomplish set goals. The compact scheduling allows you to have as many trades as possible working on site without getting in each other’s way because the dependencies have been clearly defined.

QLean Pull Planning
We’ve shown you that pull planning is a really effective way to keep your projects on track. But why settle for good when you can have great? If you’re looking for a lean construction project management system that will maximize the efficiency of your projects, you should check out VeilSun’s QLean software. Pull planning with QLean offers continuous collaboration and execution through the lifespan of a project — at an incredibly affordable rate.

QLean gives you:
Collaboration
Foster cooperation, commitment, & agreement from everyone on the project
• Coordination with all trades
• Agree on a final schedule
• Eliminates miscommunication
• Real time project management, as conversations occur
• No Excuses

Optimization
Develop a completely tight end schedule
• Collaborative process
• Agree who works on what, and when
• Outline order of events
• Lean & optimized schedule
• Void of gaps & miscommunications

Efficiency
Capture all your planning & conversations in one place
• Interface re-creates sticky notes system
• Software is a project enabler
• Update projects in real time
• Efficient, lightweight experience
• Build a lean schedule which flows in a project plan

Affordability
Stop buying new software every time you begin a new project
• Subscription-based
• Never pay per project
• More economical
• No new buying decision every time you make a new building
• Project is forever in your organization

Visit our new landing page to learn more about QLean, download our white paper and see exactly how it can help your construction projects thrive. We also have an upcoming webinar highlighting QLean on September 3. Go here to learn more.

We just came back from another amazing week at Empower. Because we know some of you couldn’t attend, we thought we’d share one of the presentations we gave there. As you no doubt gathered from the title of this blog, it centered around artificial intelligence (AI) and incorporating bots with Quick Base. The results have been astounding and the reception at Empower was amazing. Enjoy!

We’ve talked numerous times before about how flexible Quick Base is and how perfect it is for enterprises. But we wanted to take a step back and give you a 30,000 foot look at just what Quick Base is at its core. Consider this your A to Z primer on all things Quick Base. Let’s jump in.

What is Quick Base?
Simply stated, Quick Base is a low / no-code application platform that makes it easier to build and deliver multi-user web apps. As we pointed out in the above links, Quick Base is secure and scalable for small business or the enterprise. It’s the perfect solution for businesses wanting to operate more effectively and efficiently.

How does Quick Base work?
Quick Base can be used to solve many different organizational issues for small and large businesses. (To say Quick Base is flexible is the understatement of the year—we call it the ‘Swiss Army Knife of Development’ for a reason.) As a case in point, here are a few of the ways Quick Base can plug and play in your day-to-day operations:

CRM
• Sales Management
• Opportunity Tracking
• Activity Management
• Proposal Generation
• Customer Portals
• Support Ticketing
• Quoting

Project Management
• IT Project Management & Support
• Construction management
• Marketing Management
• Materials Tracking
• Order Management
• Procurement
• Professional Service Automation
• Resource Management
• Task Management
• Timesheets
• Utilization Tracking
• Work Order Management
• Warranty Tracking

Financial Management
• A/P and A/R Management
• Budgeting
• Cash Flow Management
• Commissions
• Expense Tracking
• Invoice generation
• Job Costing
• SOX Compliance
• Vendor Management

Workflow and Process Management
• Approval Processes
• Assembly line management
• Case Management
• Compliance Management
• Contract management
• Content Management
• Document Management
• ERP
• HIPAA compliance
• Human Resources
• Inventory
• Legal
• Loan Origination
• Medical Coding
• Pharma trial management
• Product Management
• Property Management
• Strategic Objective Tracking
• Supply Chain
• Training Management

Reporting and Business Intelligence
• Executive Reporting
• Forecasting
• Real-time Job Profitability
• Goal tracking
• Process Performance

What can Quick Base do?
To get a bit more specific on the long list of capabilities above, we’d like to point out that Quick Base is an Application Platform as a Service (APaaS). That means that because it’s a web technology, Quick Base allows developers and non-programmers alike to build, secure, and deploy enterprise-grade Web apps quickly and inexpensively. Quick Base is used for any type of application for any type organization. (Just in case you’d forgotten in the last few paragraphs, we’d like to remind you again just how flexible Quick Base is. It can’t be overstated enough.)


Why Quick Base?
This question is actually pretty easy to answer. You need to choose Quick Base because there’s nothing else like it. It replaces all of your spreadsheets and interfaces with all of your existing software like QuickBooks. And it does it all with no or low code. It’s so easy and so powerful to use.
o What does low-code mean?
Low-code is a new way of creating scalable Web apps that require little or no coding. Low-code apps are easy to build and cost a fraction of traditional custom Web apps cost to build.

Quick Base Costs
Cost is one of the top concerns when considering any purchase for your enterprise. We’ve covered this topic in greater detail before, but we wanted to put the highlights here in one place for easy reference. According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact Low-Code Platform Study of Quick Base, there were four distinct cost benefits associated with implementing Quick Base.

• Reduced time and cost to develop applications. Organizations saw a 60% to 85% reduction in development times, with an average of 8 weeks saved.
• Faster time-to-business value. The four composite companies represented in the study saw an additional business value of $4,418,835 over the three years of analysis.
• Avoided headcount in IT. Deploying Quick Base saved companies an average of two IT employees.
• Faster time to update and maintain applications. Achieved dramatic time and cost savings by using Quick Base to update and maintain their applications.

VeilSun has always been unapologetic evangelists for Quick Base. Hopefully with all of the amazing proof points found above, you can see why. As always, if you have any questions about how we can help implement Quick Base for your business, get in contact with us. We’re happy to talk.

Quick Base is an incredibly robust tool for developing the customized apps you need to streamline your company’s processes. As with any tool, though, it takes time and energy to learn how to use it properly — and that’s probably a waste of your internal resources.

The first time I built a customized app with Quick Base, it took nearly six weeks. Now, I can build one in just a few days. Too many companies make the mistake of wasting in-house resources trying to building tools on their own.

We love what we do. We feel really fortunate to be in this industry, partnering with the people and companies we are, and creating the work we do. It’s really a dream come true for all of us at VeilSun. Without a doubt, one of the top reasons for our success is the powerful set of core values we try to live by—and up to—every day. We’re very proud of them. That’s why we want to use this blog to take a little deeper dive into some of those values to give you a better picture of who VeilSun is, and why we do what we do for you.

VeilSun is proud to have been awarded Quick Base's 2019 "The People's Choice Award." Now, we’ve mentioned this before, but we’ve never been huge fans of blowing our own horns. But coming back with this award from the QSP Summit, a big annual conference where Quick Base Service Providers, like VeilSun, get together and hear from Quick Base about the upcoming year, has us really excited!