VeilSun Blog

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! 

What’s better than improving your productivity or increasing the ways you’re able to interact with your data? The answer, of course, is nothing. That’s why people have been using Power BI with Quick Base for years. But with a recent release, the way Power BI interacts with Quick Base has changed for the better. This blog will highlight the new Power BI connector while showing you how VeilSun’s expertise can make it matter for you.

So, what’s all the hubbub about? Quick Base recently released a certified Power BI connector that allows you to pull data from Quick Base into Power BI. This is significant because it opens up hundreds of different report types that you can report on Quick Base data. Not only that, the connector allows you to mash it up with data from other systems. It enhances the Quick Base reporting capability because Quick Base has always been very table-centric (meaning you could only report on one data set at a time). But now, that’s in the past.

When it comes to developing an app, there are obviously a lot of moving pieces contained within many different phases. This blog post is going to take a look at the one phase where we see most apps fail: the adoption stage. 

This is it! The final part of our talk, “Building a Better Death Star,” given at EMPOWER 2018. As a follow up to part 4, this entry takes a look at real-time budget accountability. Some estimates put the cost of building the Death Star at around $852 quadrillion. At that scale, we’re guessing budgets were also kind of a big deal. Down here on Earth, we operate with smaller numbers, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Let’s explore how Quick Base can help you make a galactic impact on your budget accountability.

We’re rolling ahead with part 4 of our talk, “Building a Better Death Star,” given at EMPOWER 2018. As a follow up to part 3, this entry focuses on managing risk in the field. Considering they had to evade Force Chokes from their team lead, the guys building the Death Star were clearly well versed in how to manage risk. Let’s see how that plays out for the rest of us with Quick Base.