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How J. J. Keller’s Laura Linssen Became the Marie Kondo of Quickbase

Written By: Jessica Hawley
March 25, 2019
7 min read

From cleaning out closets to eliminating messy spreadsheets, organizing is the hot trend sweeping the nation. Laura Linssen has embraced that mentality by championing Quickbase to help J. J. Keller drive continuous process improvement.

When Laura became a Quickbase builder two years ago it was the start of a new chapter in her career. Quickbase presented an opportunity to learn a new skillset—one that helped take her organizational talents, problem-solving acumen, and creativity to new heights.

Today, she builds highly popular business apps that make everyone’s work easier and faster; and from the sales department to the warehouse her visibility and the value of this work grows.

About J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc.

Experts in safety and regulatory compliance for 65 years, J. J. Keller’s extensive range of products and services help over 600,000 companies protect their workers and meet critical government regulations.

Here’s Laura’s story…

I’m the kind of person who’s never been afraid of trying something new and seeing how it works. So, when I was asked to create a workflow tool in Quickbase to help one of our teams maximize productivity, I jumped at the chance. Quickbase was something I took to naturally, and with Quickbase University courses and support from another in-house builder it wasn’t long before that first app became a reality. I had fun creating it and wanted to call it something unforgettable, so I like to refer to it as: “The Super Awesome Boom Fantastic App”.

“The success of that first solution got me hooked on Quickbase and its no-code/low-code brand of app development.”
— Laura Linssen, Workflow Management Specialist, Customer Care Department, J. J. Keller

Our team appreciated both the humor and the helpfulness of the app. They can now get their assignments, quickly update project status, ask questions, and find out about training all in one place. And it lets me easily keep track of what goes in, analyze what goes out, calculate audit scores, and monitor progress. The success of that first solution got me hooked on Quickbase and its no-code/low-code brand of development.

Chaos to order

At the time of that first build, I was working within a very large Quickbase application. Over the years it had amassed over 100 tables from all over the company. So last year, I undertook an effort to reorganize it all into more manageable chunks. My strategy was to break it up into smaller apps and assign new Quickbase builders to them so that they could manage their own tools their own way.

Along the way, I’ve also developed new internal apps in collaboration with other builders at J. J. Keller. One was to streamline the processing of thousands of incoming orders related to an electronic logging device (ELD) mandate for motor carriers. It’s called the ELD toolkit, and it feeds into a Sales Operations Administrator Dashboard that we also created. The dashboard gives Sales and Customer Care teams greater visibility to ensure that requests—like creating or changing an order or subscription or crediting a return or rerouting an order—are handled as efficiently as possible.

All Customer Care team requests now show up in this dashboard and can be easily tracked and managed. To make it even more useful I’m incorporating new things I’ve learned, like table-less functionality which, in testing, got the thumbs up from users. When we roll it out it will have a much cleaner, simpler dashboard that’s even easier to use.

Real-time Insight

People love to see where things are at and how they’re progressing, which is why one of Quickbase’s best-selling points, especially with management, is the ability to access real-time insight. In a lot of areas, it’s complex to have visibility into all the different steps in a process. Quickbase instantly changes that, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re creating so many of these apps.

“With Quickbase we can have more eyes in more places to guide the business.”
— Laura Linssen, Workflow Management Specialist, Customer Care Department, J. J. Keller

We’ve streamlined our workflows and dramatically improved visibility with dashboard-driven views and automated alerts and notifications that do away with constant babysitting. And we can deliver custom reports to management in minutes with the latest metrics. With Quickbase we can have more eyes in more places to guide the business.

Goodbye to paper forms, spreadsheets, and other “old school” ways

One of the things we have been focused on as a company for some time is getting rid of spreadsheets and physical forms. Storing forms digitally in Quickbase has helped us do this.

Another area where we’ve improved efficiency is in our Customer Care department. Before, Sales might send us an email saying, “Hey I need this done.” And then we’d have to email back and say, “We need X, Y, & Z to process the request.” By creating all these interconnected Quickbase applications, we have everything we need at our fingertips and there’s a lot less back and forth.

I’m also working on a Quickbase solution to replace a metrics spreadsheet for the Customer Care department. It takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to update every day, but by putting it all in Quickbase it will automatically create a report for me and I’ll never have to do it manually again.

More and more of our work and data are going over and connecting up to Quickbase which will help us drive even more efficiency and visibility.

“More and more of our work and data are going over and connecting up to Quickbase which will help us drive even more efficiency and visibility.”
— Laura Linssen, Workflow Management Specialist, Customer Care Department, J.J. Keller

Making apps fun and engaging

What I really like about Quickbase is that it enables me to put my own brand of “jazz” into the apps. For instance, “Taskipedia” is a fun word I made up for a wizard we added to the Sales Operations Administrator Dashboard. Say someone needs to create a credit memo. They click on Taskipedia, get a definition of the task and instructions on what they need to do to make it happen.

I also use a lot of tabs, buttons, and icons in my apps and love adding a pop of color. Visually, I think it’s just nicer and more welcoming than a boring black and white screen. I also do app redesigns from time to time, and Quickbase makes it easy to keep evolving. Users love the added value—whether it’s incorporating their feedback or including the latest Quickbase features and functionality.

One of my favorite Quickbase apps that we’ve created is the “Kudos” app. This one has been so much fun for our team, and it has become so popular that the Inbound Sales department just adopted it too. The way that it works is you can broadcast a shout out to a person that everyone can see, like, “Thank you so much for your help today, John.” and give them a kudos chip. Chips get automatically banked and people can redeem them for gift cards and other prizes. It’s our feel good, make the world bright and happy app!

Laura in the limelight

I’ve been at J.J. Keller almost 18 years, so I’ve come to know lot of people in that time, but the work I’ve done simplifying processes and automating workflows with Quickbase has definitely helped bring the visibility of what I can do to a whole new level. Now that people know, and have seen, what I can build in Quickbase, demand has gone through the roof and I’m meeting even more people across the company.

“I’ve been at J. J. Keller almost 18 years, so I’ve come to know lot of people in that time, but the work I’ve done simplifying processes and automating workflows with Quickbase has definitely helped bring the visibility of what I can do to a whole new level.”

— Laura Linssen, Workflow Management Specialist, Customer Care Department, J. J. Keller

When I first I got into this workflow management position, I had no idea what I was doing. So, being able to take Quickbase app building on; own and improve my solution; expand it so that it’s used in lots of different ways; and help create other solutions that people are excited about, has really been an amazing journey for me.

I also enjoy sharing that journey with other builders, helping them get their start. They’re just as excited to get in here and begin creating, and that’s a win for everyone.

Written By: Jessica Hawley
Jessica Hawley is a marketing manager at Quickbase, focused on SEO, content and social media.
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