Verité Drives Effective Project Management with Quickbase

Verité selected Quickbase for its ability to generate real-time dashboards, built-in alerts and notifications that keep projects moving, and complete flexibility to change and adapt to the company's evolving needs.

Challenge

Difficult to manage hundreds of concurrent projects with pre-packaged project management software
Inability to customize the software made project tracking more time-consuming
Limited and inefficient reporting capabilities hampered visibility and decision making

Solution

Quickbase as a platform for a highly-customizable project management tool
Unlimited reports and charts for easy access to key data
Ecosystem of Quickbase partners to help with more technical requirements

Benefits

Cost savings from in-house development ($80,000) and increased efficiency ($24,000)
Ability to take on significantly more work without adding lots of new staff
Greater job satisfaction and promotion to management position

The Challenges

Since its founding over 20 years ago, Verité, Inc. has been a champion of safe, fair, and legal labor conditions for workers worldwide. As an independent non-profit organization, it aids companies and governments in improving work conditions across global supply chains through its research, advocacy, consulting, trainings, and assessments.

With hundreds of engagements in over 70 countries, effective project management is crucial to Verités mission, but the companys project management software was limited and inflexible. Users were forced to work with field names and processes that didnt quite fit; and only the IT manager could run reports which were essentially data dumps that recipients had to sort through.

"We had many different data points we wanted to track in real time, and we needed a way to quickly pull that information into meaningful reports for the individuals using them," says Jenn Stachnik, Manager, Accounting & IT at Verité, Inc.

The Solution

Verité now tracks projects in a Quickbase app that brings disparate data sources into the online Quickbase repository for easy access from anywhere. Quickbases unlimited reporting capabilities allow anyone with access to create highly-customized reports covering any project-related information they need.

As the companys needs change, Stachnik or a colleague can easily update the app to keep pace. For more technical challenges, the Verité team relies on help from The Data Collaborative, an official Quickbase Solution Provider.

"One of the things I really like about The Data Collaborative is that their experts are always there when we need them," says Stachnik. "If we cant find an answer though the Quickbase Community, or need something that requires more advanced coding, theyre just a call away."

The Benefits

Quickbase is now more than just a project management solution at Verité. Its also used for managing invoices, expenses, timesheets, audits, training, and more. Not only did the team save an estimated $80,000 in development costs by building solutions on Quickbase, it has also empowered those closest to the work to be more efficient. Over the past three years the company has increased revenues by $2 million and added significantly to its project load but has only needed to hire one additional project coordinator.

The more problems the company solves with Quickbase, the more valuable the platform becomes. Employees are now familiar with Quickbases user interface, so new solutions are adopted faster. For her part in improving the organization, Stachnik earned a promotion to a management position.

"Quickbase makes everyones job easier and more satisfying, including mine," says Stachnik. "I love that people can come to me with problems and walk away with solutions."