I didn't use them before the company did. We had a strategy to help us augment limitations in our current cloud solutions. 

Where certain cloud providers are not going to give you the ability to change the platform, or it might take several years if they listen to your feedback, there might be real limitations in terms of what they do. Most of the off-the-shelf type cloud providers or cloud applications will get you about 80% of the way there from a business process. We use the Zudy team and VINYL product to close the gap and get us the remaining 20%.

Prior to using Zudy and the VINYL platform, I would be involved in a little bit more of your traditional development frameworks.

VINYL is a new product, so we had nothing before it.  We use another developer company for our World Pet Registry database, but we aren't using them for this project because our experience with them has been rocky at times.  

Previous to Zudy VINYL we were using a couple of very manual, non-cloud, solutions: a lot of Excel sheets, a lot of Google Docs, because that was the only way to get granular enough for the details that we needed. It's a huge improvement and we're glad to not be using those other very fine platforms. We're really happy that we were able to integrate everything and roll it into Zudy VINYL.

We didn't have roll-up reporting and we didn't have workflow approvals. Those were the really two big ones. It was very hard, on a macro level, to see our business. And on a micro level, local stakeholders were tired of how many emails were floating around. Now, we just have a dashboard that shows where the to-do list is and the task list of who is responsible for what, in the order that we set up. It's been a game-changer. No one can cry that they never saw anything or never approved anything. Everybody has the business intelligence now to make those decisions and those approvals, right there on the spot. They don't have to go searching for it in a different platform.

Ease of use was one of the main reasons that Zudy won our RFP. For someone like me, who knows enough to be dangerous—who can get in, and build, and experiment around, but by no means is software development my first expertise or my "day job"—it's been wonderful to not have incredibly sophisticated needs on the build side, but still be able to have incredibly sophisticated results. It's really been a blessing and I'm really happy with it.

The fact that it's a no-code solution is another reason that we chose to work with them. It has allowed a lot more folks to get in and build some custom integrations on our side, people who may not have been able to do so with other pieces of software.

For this particular type of requirement, we mostly built apps in .NET with our application development team. This is a departure from that, as a way to build apps. But we haven't used any of Zudy's competitors. We were just using traditional methods and this is our first foray into the no-code sort of platform.

It was one of those things where we had some needs and this was a very low-cost option. We were one of their earliest customers so they did invest in some consulting time for free to help us build a couple of things, to prove out conceptually that the system could do what we wanted. That helped us.

But part of it was the fact that it was a low-cost option. With the Lite Integration, I wasn't going to have to disrupt my entire organization to do something. We haven't had to disrupt IT and the business organizations to keep them up and running. It's a nice product from that perspective because it allows you to gain some efficiencies without having to rip apart your IT organization to actually install something; sometimes, moving to new platforms can be really complicated.

We had an older product that was built in-house and was no longer flexible enough to keep up with the market requirements. We needed to upgrade our solution; the only way to do that was to start from scratch. We also need to have something live in 90 days which is unheard of.

We used to have five to seven different custom applications that we got rid of because they were becoming very difficult to support. We wanted to get rid of the multiple siloed applications because they were not meeting the business needs. We moved to get everything under one umbrella and have a single experience and user interface for the employees, and to get all of the data in one place.

I was brought in as our team was switching from another low-code platform to VINYL. I was told the other platform was much slower and offered much less support from a technical standpoint, which we definitely needed for our changing business needs.

We did not have a previous no-code solution.

We came to the realization that we needed a solution like Zudy because I was on a call and someone was proposing Zudy for something completely different. My ears perked up. I said, "I can use this for a lot of other places within the company, not just the one particular application that you guys are looking at it for. We ended up having a phone call with a few key members over at Zudy and were able to bang out a proof of concept for something I thought would be pretty hard to implement through our own coding practices. They knocked it out of the park.

Our previous platform had a development team and an agreement along with that. To make any changes or enhancements, we had to go through that process. So there is nothing to compare [Zudy] to. That was part of why we wanted to look at other options and, fortunately, we found Zudy.

I knew that we had to make a change in our ERP platform. I was brought in to NXC Imaging to evaluate what was going on with their ERP solution. They were having all kinds of issues with their Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. It took me about two months to understand what had happened, and I immediately recognized that we needed to go down a different path.

We needed to change our strategy of staying with a Tier 1 or Tier 2 platform. What we do is unique and there isn't software that we can buy. I knew that we needed to invest in a no- code, or low-code application development platform that would give us rapid development capabilities. I've had experience with other platforms in the past, so it was a pretty easy decision for me to go after getting board approval to make this happen.

I did not previously use another solution.

Before VINYL, we didn't have a solution to do these kinds of things, so we were just doing everything manually on paper and Excel.

The primary symptom that made us realize we needed something was that a lot of folks were doing their work in Excel, and we had data in all different places. One person had a spreadsheet here; another person was using a Google Doc. It was just all over the place. When the data's there, you can't get to it, and you can't report on it. It was pretty evident to us that we needed to do something and let's bring this data into one central place.

We chose VINYL because of the subscription model. It was easier to get into as opposed to a big purchase. The competing products didn't have as many features. They offered a complete software package that was already configured, and then you would customize it. Whereas with VINYL, you can take baby steps to get to where you want to go. Do a little piece at a time. Take one issue, take one problem, fix that, and then as it gradually grows into a full solution, rather than trying to fit this huge solution in all at once.

Prior to Zudy, I actually built out the entire prototype in Microsoft Excel. And even Microsoft said, "Boy, that's a lot of stuff. We've seen Excel do some crazy things; yours is way up there for complexity. There's hardly any that are more complex than what you've just shown us." And that's Microsoft talking. So I thought I had a great template that I'd be able to have people build off of, because everything was working in there. And it wasn't the case, even though it was there and I had all the instructions. 

We tried things like FileMaker Pro. We tried things like Airtable and Webflow and UXPin, and coding from scratch. We also tried Bubble and MacGyver. There have been a lot of things that we've tried, or at least that I've tested out; even just straight, from-scratch HTML and starting everything from there. We just couldn't make it go. We were excited to finally be able to get everything working.

The way I came across Zudy for the first time was just a lot of internet searches. I'm someone who does a ton of research before I jump into anything. The one downfall is that they maybe weren't as public-facing, and they've admitted that. So I was hesitant to go with them at first, just because they didn't have a lot of information that I could really dig up. I think that's actually part of the reason why they're doing these videos, to be able to get the word out and get into the smaller and medium-sized businesses like mine. But it was a lot of research and it was a lot of checking and it was a lot of comparing. It wasn't until I talked to them and saw some of their demos that I really started to believe that maybe these guys could actually do it.

It mostly replaced Excel, Access, and emails. Access 365 was not doing as much as it had in previous versions.

Our CEO had a relationship with someone at Zudy, so we tested the product and saw it as an early opportunity. It fit with our requirements and we were trying to move on from Microsoft Access.

We knew that we needed to invest in a different solution that was more flexible and scalable. We've used VINYL to replace several Legacy systems. Previously we had individual Legacy systems for Made To Measure, which was homegrown, and not flexible.

We had a different company we worked with for an implementation of an alteration system, which again, was not scalable, and did not grow with us as a company. It's those reasons that really helped point us in a direction to think longer term, and have a flexible solution that will grow with us as our business grows.

We did not have a previous solution. We were in need of a good rapid application development software which could easily be handled by two or three people in terms of maintenance. We wanted something that is easy to understand. And we also went with VINYL because it is really user-friendly.

I was looking for a tool with which I could easy build dashboards from multiple sources which didn't necessarily go together. It didn't make sense to build a single data warehouse out of information which was quite disparate. So, I found a viable solution in VINYL.

We were using a manual system that we created ourselves, and that's why we switched.

We deployed Vinyl about nine months ago. Previously, we were using a small application that wrote code for our personnel in a manner very unlike the way that Vinyl does. It was something that we worked with because it was all we could find, but as soon as we found Vinyl, we put it into play.

Before VINYL, it was very manual for us. Zudy is the first tool where we really tried to bring together these two data sources. We went to Zudy VINYL to merge Accpac and our distributor data. It was the first tool we really found. We needed something that could be extremely customizable.

I was very new in my role at Collette when I started talking with Zudy. What I walked into was the scenario where there were a lot of people depending on spreadsheets, a nightmare of version control and sharing of data, and I was looking to solve beyond what we had internally. Therefore, about a year and a half ago, we engaged with Zudy and it was the solution for us.

It is a platform which can grow with us and get us out of spreadsheets.

We used Microsoft Project and Microsoft Access, but the system just kept on crashing and it wasn't sustained by our IT department, so it was a lot of having to do it ourselves. It was manual and there was a lot of room for error. We moved to Zudy because it was a system everybody could understand and it wasn't outdated.