Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

The primary use case for us is creating applications for business and manufacturing productivity.  We are a small to mid-size manufacturing company, and there are lots of processes and data collection that is made much easier with Vinyl apps.  

For example, we have an app that allows our quality team to run QC audits on our product and enter the results against targeted measurements. We now have a database of quality audits and can run actionable reports based on this data.  

When a quality team member has a suggestion for the app, there always seems to be a way in Vinyl to deliver the feature request.

We can take basically any manual data entry process that exists in the organization and replace it with a much easier-to-use Vinyl app.  

The data collection and reporting are much more robust than team-shared spreadsheets. Raw material receiving, quality auditing, and equipment utilization are all examples of processes greatly improved by Vinyl apps. We can even integrate with our ERP system by APIs and replace clunky ERP interfaces with much better Vinyl interfaces.  

I get constant feedback from users that it has made their life easier to use the Vinyl apps instead of the previous tool they used.

App development, database storage, and 3rd party app integrations are great. The low-code development makes data storage easy, and web-based apps are very customizable. The platform can connect to many third-party data sources.  

The training resources are also robust and allow for complete online training.  We have set up development, QA, and production environments to isolate our different processes safely.  

Vinyl makes it easy to push changes between the environments. So many out-of-the-box features work well with Vinyl. However, Zudy has also worked closely with us to create plugins and other features that meet our exact needs.

I don't have much to say about improvements. I am relatively new when it comes to the development of apps in Vinyl. I sometimes find formatting tricky to get the front end of an app the way I want it. That could be improved by a more intuitive use of themes.  

Overall, Vinyl does a very good job at what it is meant to do - low code development of apps. It helps to have a background in SQL. It is not necessary, however, as Vinyl shows you all the underlying data to the app under development. It has become an invaluable tool for our organization.

I have been using the solution for about six months, however, the company has been using it for longer.

Our first use case for Zudy VINYL was actually to implement and automate workflows for some complex tasks with a lot of handoffs. One example was, as we onboarded a great number of employees at the late end of 2019 and early 2020, we had about 100 people who needed to be onboarded in a short timeframe. There were a lot of handoffs, people involved, and steps which could go off the rails if we didn't have some clear structure for how the handoffs would work. Using the Zudy VINYL platform, we were able to automate that workflow and make sure that everybody was on task and on point. We started to expand additional workflows from there, then we started getting into more custom applications for niche solutions and individual business problems that people were bringing to IT to solve.

One of the applications that we developed, and was completely custom, with the Zudy VINYL platform, was an integrated hub and integrated portal for our sales force. So, we have about 300 people as customers. We have essentially built a single point of entry for information, various applications, and subapplications that are also built on VINYL. But, the entire sales force can go in and have customized information, specific to the sales force and sometimes specific to them, right at their interface. Some of the things that they can do is receive specific communications that are categorized across different areas of marketing. They have access to custom applications, such as a digital detailing aid, that we used when we were still trying to stand up our CRM in the wake of the COVID transition, where they could access materials and detailing aids that they would put in front of their customers. They are also able to update some of their employee information, which integrates with our ADP system, as well as access videos and presentations, which different areas of marketing put out for them.

The integration is a huge accelerator into enabling new business processes. As a small company, we have a few different systems that otherwise couldn't talk to each other. We recognize, from an IT perspective, the value that data and change in status of certain data in one area could influence the ability to take action in another. With these integration points, we are able to essentially create that communication from one system to another, letting system B know that something has been completed or is ready in system A. That allows our users to know that they are ready to complete a task. Without that, we would be relying on a lot of manual communication. We would be relying on individuals sending emails, saying, "Hey, by the way, this is ready in system A." Now, we have the system recognizing it and shooting that email off automatically, with all the instructions necessary.

I like to think that the Zudy VINYL product is the perfect middleware for the different applications that we have scattered around our infrastructure. What I like about it is that we know how to use it to get one system to talk to another or pull information from multiple systems into one view for dashboarding, metrics, or reporting. Its ability to integrate with those various systems, and fill the white space between those systems where business users have needs, is really what has made it a differentiator in our organization.

We are using Zudy VINYL to fill white space between some of the existing business processes happening in systems that are already standing up. So, to say, "Is it running? Is it fully running back-end processes in the office?" We're not using it for that purpose, but the overall capability of the tool has certainly demonstrated it. Whereas, if we really wanted to jack up the amount we're putting in there, the sky is really the limit on what we could actually pull into VINYL and processes.

The most valuable feature within Zudy VINYL is just the ability to quickly, without having to worry about digging into code, put together user interfaces that match the business requirements and the user's expectation to do rapid deployment. A couple of the things that we really put to work in a lot of our applications are the use of structured communication and notification that is triggered by business events. So, when an activity is completed in the system, Zudy VINYL is able to integrate with our address book and Outlook to send the appropriate notices and deliverables to the people who need to use them next. Then, they can pick the task up without having to go back into the system to know that there is something on their plate.

Zudy is really easy to use. I am a non-developer myself, and I'm able to hang out in the conversations with our technical folks and Zudy consultants who drive a lot of the work development for us. The no-code/low-code platform is extremely intuitive. Our users are able to visualize solutioning. When we are working through an app, they are able to picture a way something would work. They are familiar with the ways Zudy might help them engage in the information that they want to work with. It has been a very easy conversation and easy development process, both within IT and with business customers.

The speed of development for custom applications has been incredibly rapid and really exceeded, not only IT's expectations, but the business users as well. Often, when we are bringing up or conceptualizing a new idea, two or three business days later, we have a conceptual prototype that we are able to put in front of our business users and start building from there. Many of our applications have only taken one to two weeks to stand up in a test environment and then have them deployed to production within about a week after that.

Zudy VINYL integrates really well through APIs and other data integrators. We have worked with about four or five other different systems that we have tied Zudy to, including Viva, ADP, and Oracle. I have yet to bring up a system where we have an idea for an interface, or an exchange of information, where we haven't figured out some way to make that connection, either through a direct API or by using a creative-like FTP process where we drop files someplace and have another system pick them up.

One of the features that they were able to add as part of a business need on the fly was the integration of DocuSign as well as an integration of an iPad touch signature pad. These were plugins that they were able to take, integrate with the tool as they built it, and we were able to create some cool stuff, like attestation forms or sign-off forms. Whereas, if we wanted to capture an official DocuSign signature, or just a scanned signature, we were able to take those tools, integrate them with a PDF presenter, and push electronic versions of forms out to people who they could then sign or acknowledge them right on their iPads. The system would save that as a final document that we could then archive. This wasn't an out-of-the-box feature that Zudy had, but by using the platform and pulling in other applications the way that we envisioned using them, we were able to create things that met our business needs.

During the initial rollout, the text editor wasn't 100% what we were looking for, but we were able to get the job done. After some discussions and finding ways to use different plugins during the short term, Zudy actually came back a few months later and said that they have integrated a standard product into their text editing that checked all the boxes for us. This has made it a lot easier to not only support the product, but to use it for new business ideas.

We've been using Zudy VINYL for a good two years. We started in the commercial space, but we have started to use Zudy VINYL across both our R&D and commercial business areas.

We have found the stability of the VINYL platform to be extremely reliable. We have had some point outages at times, where a plugin or something that interfaces with the VINYL platform went out on its own. Then, we experience that the employee portal or the app is down. After investigating, we found that the VINYL app was functioning perfectly. The challenges came into play when an integrated piece went out. So, I have no examples when the VINYL platform itself was out and causing business problems for us.

What scalability has meant for the field is that when we were shut down after the COVID pandemic hit, for example, we had to pivot very quickly to give our sales force a way to engage HCPs virtually when they were initially anticipating being out in the field and live with them. So, we were able to stand up products which helped them achieve that objective. We had short-term fixes for some of the other business challenges, but the most mission-critical one was to get out there and start selling and meeting our HCPs. Once we delivered that core capability, we were able to circle back, look at some of the secondary requirements, and start to deliver those. 

We actually built new features and built them right into the tools that the sales force was already used to accessing. They simply had either broader menus, more selections, or more options when they went in, but they never lost the core functionality. That was huge for us because we were able to get people out to the field quickly. Then, we took the things that were not critical paths and delivered them at the time that was right for them, instead of trying to wait until everything was ready, then deliver it as a single waterfall approach.

We have implemented close to 40 applications that have ranged from a huge multi-user system to simple business accelerators that help a small team do something in a new or more effective way. I don't see a real end to that as we grow and continue to evolve our processes.

Technical support has been great. I tend to work primarily with one or two consultants who are my interface to the team. Whenever we have issues that need to be investigated, they are interfacing on my behalf. We usually get answers within hours or within a business day or two.

Zudy continuously looks for feedback and takes learnings from the development that we are putting in place to figure out how to make the product better. Over the course of the relationship, I have seen two releases to a new version as well as some hotfixes that have been put in place specifically because of things that we found while we were developing. One example of that is a text editing feature they have. So, we have taken a lot of folks out of email and Outlook for their communications, giving them an interface in Zudy's VINYL platform to actually do their authoring, formatting, and things like that. While those messages ultimately push back out to Outlook to reach some of the users, the users don't have to write it in one place, then port it over to another.

There is nothing that I have really felt has been completely lacking from a Zudy perspective. Every time I have gone to the Zudy team and asked them for a read on being able to implement a certain feature or do something a certain way, there has always been a way to do it. That might be the limitation of our vision, but it seems to me that the tool and, in particular, the staff at Zudy, really understand how to use the tool creatively to address just about any business problem that I've had brought their way.

It took about three months to stand up all the features that we wanted in the sales employee portal. The first few features were developed in a matter of weeks, but as we identified different business requirements that we realized we wanted to enable for the field to use, we were able to quickly identify the requirements, build on the module, and tack it into the delivery workflow. So, the overall delivery of the portal, while stretching out over a course of several weeks, was actually a stack of different, smaller rollouts that each only took three to five weeks to develop.

If I had to think about it across the 40 applications, I am not even sure that I can give an order of magnitude. There is not only time and effort savings, but the ability to do something where we simply just couldn't do it. With COVID throwing everyone for a curve ball last March, there were simply things we weren't able to do. We didn't know how to visualize them. We had to stand up a commercial solution to address our sales force's needs. It would have taken more time than we would have wished in order to get our sales force out and selling. So, in addition to the time savings, the ability to enable people with an effective solution where there was really no alternative. Doing this quickly and effectively has really been the key value-add for my company using Zudy.

The Zudy VINYL platform is the primary solution that we evaluated for workflow automation. Once we brought the system and platform in-house, we found that we were able to use it for additional business needs where we might have otherwise gone out to market to look at commercial off-the-shelf systems for particular business needs that are not workflow oriented.

I haven't gone out to the market to look at a lot of competitors, but I can't imagine that any of them are going to blow my expectations away the way that the VINYL platform has.

The advice that I would give to someone whose thinking of implementing Zudy VINYL is, "Absolutely give it a really strong look. Speak to the Zudy staff about your particular business cases." I think that if you are using Excel spreadsheets or workflows that are primarily dependent on human manual communication, this solution will address so many of those needs. It is definitely a great application that we have brought in. I continue to find new uses for it on almost a daily basis.

The most recent version of Zudy Vinyl certainly brought a bunch of new things to the table. I think one of them was the text editor. I think that the general interface for Zudy, when you first come into the product to look for the different apps you've developed, is a little bit more intuitive and organized. We bypassed a lot of that with our employee portal, but when we do have to go out to that interface, it is easy to navigate.

On a scale of one to 10, I'm going to give them a 10 for what I need them to do. When I think about not just VINYL but Zudy as a service provider and partner, they are really checking all the boxes for us in terms of the human capital they bring to the table, the flexibility of the platform, and creativity. It is really doing everything for us that we would want it to do right now. 

We started out doing prototyping and moved that to a demonstration application. Now, we are moving into a trial version that we hope will convert over into our running application.

It works well online and on my mobile. It is storing data in our Cloud Datastore, as well as theirs.

We are on the most current VINYL release.

We are a startup, and this product will not be for internal consumption. This is going to be a product for sale that we're building. It solves an industry problem today where there is no management of data, and it's just spreadsheets emailed around. So far, people in the industry who have seen what we are doing like what they see.

The team is its most valuable feature. The people I work with are great. They can get the stuff done that I want done usually faster than I expect.

The product is super fast at getting things done. 

I had expected a portal that can be secure and handle data ingestion and visualization. It hits all those points and that is what it's doing.

There are some acknowledged technical limitations. I was looking to do some metadata manipulation, which is very atypical. Zudy said that they will work on building me a workaround. If there is a weakness, that would be it. However, they seem to acknowledge it and are finding a workaround for me. While it may not be in VINYL, they are doing an external program to shore up the weakness.

We started using it the week before Thanksgiving 2019. So, we have been using it for about four months.

I have been given concrete examples of how the solution scales, but I'm not really worried about it right now.

We don't have any users at the moment. We have people preparing to become trial users.

I have never had to grab technical support outside of the developers

I did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They keep me aware of anything complex, but I do not have to expend any energy to deal with it.

They got a good demonstration application done for me in two months. This allowed me to get funding so I could survive as a business. The application was good enough to get customers interested. I like to say, "I would be working at Walmart if they hadn't been successful."

Today, everything is in the Zudy space. We will then migrate it over into our cloud space, which they are capable of doing. We will keep them as our prototype vendor; whenever we are working on new things, they will do that for us. Some of the actual running systems, we will probably keep it on VINYL until we run into something that we can't do.

I'm not doing the programming (or no-coding), but I'm managing the features with their architects. All the development is being done by the Zudy team. I am working on getting some developers who can augment that team, but we haven't added that yet.

I have seen ROI. The biggest benefits are:

• The speed
• The team's ability to budget
• The team's ability to stay within budget and get things done.
• We are able to experiment, and usually you can't afford to experiment much.

Compared to if I used traditional methods, such as hiring developers and setting up systems, VINYL is costing me less than half of what it would normally cost.

I did look at all of the rapid development options, like Zoho. I liked my interface with the business team at Zudy well enough that I didn't look at anybody else because they seem to know what they are doing.

This is a platform which should be considered seriously for rapid prototyping. If you want to build it yourself, at least use them to do the early testing. I would also recommend to consider them for your long-term production platform use. For data management and data visualization, this product is hard to beat. Feature-wise, I haven't run into anything that we just can't do. It accesses our external systems and processes, using them very well.

For what they have given me, the product is a 10 (out of 10).

We use it for progressive apps, especially when workflows of the past, again, paper trail, can be replaced with electronic, which is what mine has done.

VINYL has improved the way our organization functions with our paper trail. What I mean by that is that one of our process workflows was all paper-based. VINYL was taken and replaced the paper trail with an electronic trail throughout, with audits, which we didn't have before. It's made things seamless and it's more efficient, and there's an audit trail where it wasn't there before.

Has it increased my productivity? Yes, when I'm allowed to actually code in VINYL. But when I'm not in VINYL then it doesn't, obviously, and not everything can be switched to VINYL. We have to have buy-in from upper and lower management, whoever the users are.

We definitely have used the solution to bring more than one data set together. We have an IT dashboard checking system that brings together DNS, DHCP, WINS, SUS, Alertus. There are about fifteen different data sets that come together on one visual to see whether people have something installed on their PCs or not. It gives our help desk visibility across a person's PC as to what they're missing or what they have.

As a programmer, I came from a programming world, so it was hard for me to use the tool because it was very foreign to a programmer, but it's very dynamic. So if I build one panel, it can go across to the different tools, phone, iPad, computer, and I don't have to worry about redesigning it for each platform.

Only because consultants can see places to use the tool where we're blind to that because we've just done it that way in the past. I don't know if I'm explaining myself right, but when they come in they can see a need for it, or a use case for it, that we would have never picked. So the consultants have provided places where the tool can benefit us that we would have never thought of.

What additional features would I like to see is easy: drag and drop UI interface. That what you see is what you get. Right now it's very dependent on having an imagination to understand. If I put a control on a page, what it's going to look like at the end result. I would much rather have, I drag it in place and then I do the backend stuff. I would like to see it before I have to build it.

Three years.

I like the stability of VINYL because I can see them always increasing, changing, making it better. I've worked with it for three years now and what it used to be in the first year to what it is now is a world of difference. They've taken our suggestions, as users, and moved the platform in the right direction, fixing those problems and making it better. As long as they keep doing that, I see a long life for the product.

VINYL definitely has the capability to be scalable in the fact that it can be a reporting tool or an ETL tool or just bringing of datasets together tool. So, scalable across different solutions.

Since we have two of the consultants on site, anytime I have a question, they're right there and if they don't know the answer, they go right onto the forums and reach back to the home company and get the answer for me. So, it's been outstanding.

The VINYL consultants are outstanding because they can bring a visual into our organization from the outside and see things like I said, we can't see. We're blind to it and then they're able to let us know, subtly, that we need to change, and change to a better app platform, which is VINYL, to get the work done more efficiently, more effectively.

The initial setup I came into my first week with the organization, so it was already ongoing. I'm not sure I'm a good perspective on that. It seemed scattered, but it may be our organization and not theirs, and it could just be the data.

We weren't sold on VINYL in the beginning. It was brought in, it was used for something, a proof of concept, but it wasn't really utilized to its full potential.

I went to the TechEd conference last year and I saw what it could do by seeing all the other customers and that's when we really started adapting it. I came back to the office and I said, "I see you use cases that I never would have seen if I hadn't seen the other solutions in place." So, I think the TechEd is our turning point where we started really utilizing it.

I guess I would say "be open to it." And, if you're a programmer, don't look at it with a programmer's mind. If you're a business person or business analyst, you're going to be able to understand how the tool works. Programmers, coders have a pre-set understanding of how to code, and this is not how to code. This is how to build an APP. So you have to go into it with an open mind.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably rate it at an eight. It is a young product and still growing. I see it growing the right way. As long as they, the VINYL staff and developers, keep up with changes of the technology and the times, I see it growing to be better than eight, but right now, eight because of some of the limitations it has.

We use VINYL as a solution to eliminating management reports that are paper-based. We've automated all of those paper reports to be electronic web-based and on mobile applications.

The product has improved our organization's function through all of our management reports that we do monthly are now online, on mobile applications, and ready to be reviewed by executives weeks before they previously would have been available.

The solutions helped us identify where we have bad data within our organization and bringing that to the forefront so we can fix the root cause of issues that are happening. We use the solution to develop progressive apps as we are consistently iterating on what's already been developed and adding new capabilities and functionality to the apps that we're having developed.

One of the most valuable features of the solution is how rapid we can implement it, going from a design to an operational concept in a very short period of time.

We've been relying on Zudy from a consultant basis to do all of our development, and it's been fairly positive. I'd like to see the next release of VINYL have more user interface solutions to it, so that it could be a more user-friendly product on the front end for the customers that are utilizing the tool. We didn't have a solution to help automate all of our reporting in the past which identified the need to make sure that we could tap into our data sources and automate all of our reporting, which is exactly why we needed the tool.

The Zudy VINYL platform is consistent. We haven't had any issues with it going out of service or functionality where it should have been available and it hasn't been. It's stable.

I think that there are concerns with the scalability of the VINYL platform, in making sure that it is secure and being able to be utilized for long periods of time without consistent maintenance.

Zudy's technical support has been spot on. Every time we've needed them, they've been able to deliver what we're looking for.

If I were to give advice to somebody researching a solution such as VINYL, I would tell them to make sure that they understand all of the ins and outs, especially on the front end in what the user sees to make sure that VINYL has the capabilities they're looking for from a front end and customer facing perspective. To ensure that it has visuals, its ease of use, its ability to click through and be mobile at the same time as web-based. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Zudy VINYL about a seven. I'm not too familiar with it yet to give it a more solid rating. 

We're able to develop things quickly, but at the same time there's been a lot of issues across multiple pages where it should have been fixed once, and it's fixed on certain pages, but not all as we're going through the development process.

Our company works with medical devices. We sell and service imaging equipment to hospitals and clinics in the territories we serve. NXC's primary use case for Zudy VINYL was to provide a mobile field service management application that our current ERP provider could not provide to us.

VINYL has improved the way that our company functions. Primarily, the first impact was user satisfaction. The majority of our employees at NXC imaging are not in the office. They're out in the field covering the territories that we serve so prior to VINYL, they had to log in or they had to find Wi-Fi, then log into a VPN. Then they had to connect to a terminal server. Then they had to open up Microsoft Dynamics AX and then navigate to their schedule. What VINYL has given us is the ability to serve up all of that information on their phone, so now they're free to do their jobs. They're pretty happy.

VINYL has given us the ability to really improve the speed with which we deploy releases and respond to the good ideas that our people have.

Another thing that this application has allowed us to do is to bring value to the business very quickly. The benefits or the impact on the IT organization is a big morale builder or booster for us. The real benefit is that our IT organization now has the confidence to say yes to requests as opposed to no or have significant delays. The team is motivated to field requests, work on improvements and rollout changes. It's very easy to roll out a change. It takes a couple of minutes depending on the app that we're we're talking about. It's pretty easy to keep my team going in the right direction.

Prior to VINYL, we were working within a Tier 2 application that took a very long time for us to change. It's very, very expensive. Our burn rate for making changes in VINYL is about a tenth of what it was in the other platform and we can do it in a tenth of the time.

Comparing where we've been to where we are now in terms of the technical platform, it's incredibly easy to make changes, and it's incredibly easy to approve. From being able to deliver value to their business from a user perspective, it's really cool as an IT leader to be able to say yes to requests and deliver them in a timely fashion, as opposed to saying no, or coming up with reasons to delay or to give them a long term "it depends" answer.

The most valuable features of Zudy VINYL are the abilities for us to rapidly develop applications, deploy them easily, and then make adjustments as we realize the things that we forgot to put in the first release or the second release. We've done eight releases in eleven months for our field management solution.

The features that I'd like to see in VINYL next would be the ability to have more control over or have a rule-based control over column headings and column labels. Depending on what we're trying to display to a user, we can put in rules to change things around, make it easier for that.

The other thing would be a more sophisticated workflow engine. I'm an ex-Nintex user, and having a more graphical user interface to be able to build complex workflows would be really good.

The stability of VINYL is pretty amazing. It just works.

The scalability of VINYL is what I'm counting on. The licensing model is amazing for us, to be able to do as many apps as we can for the cost that we're paying and not have to worry about the per-user cost going up. We are planning on replacing our entire ERP platform with VINYL apps, building the things that we need that we can't buy off the shelf.

The tech support at Zudy is top notch. They are a bunch of talented people who are very responsive and we've not had any significant business interruption since going live with our first app last year.

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.

Installing and getting Zudy up and running was very easy from an infrastructure point of view. What was unique about us is that we were their first Dynamics AX integration. They had not done AX before, so it took them about three days to figure out the business connectors and the data model, and from there we were rolling.

The team that we used, and are using, to build our apps is Zudy. They've been a great group to work with; very talented, very flexible, very responsive, and they're just a good group of guys.

VINYL has affected our user productivity in many ways. The most measurable is the amount of time that our field engineers were spending feeding our old ERP system data. I can guess that every FE, and we've got more than fifty in our company, has got an extra hour of their day back not having to deal with the connectivity and all the different transactions that they're doing. The ability to interface with the apps on their phone has made their lives significantly better.

Another thing from an IT perspective, what VINYL has given us is the ability to reestablish confidence in our user base. Our people recognize the difference in VINYL versus before VINYL, and they really, really like the VINYL experience better than anything else they've had in the past.

The VINYL platform with the Zudy development team has allowed us to be significantly more responsive to the business as they come up with ideas or we needed to make process changes. Business process changes are evolving all the time, new markets, new technologies. I would say that the speed of the improvement in iterations is tenfold. We can do things 10 times faster in VINYL than we could in Dynamics AX at a tenth of the cost. Fixes that would take our old service provider weeks and months to do, can take five minutes.

The value for us with VINYL is that we've got one fee that we're paying per year and we can deploy and build as many apps and bring in as many users as we need. It's a big change from the Microsoft Dynamics AX model, where we have per-user fees, and in order for us to provide or to get access for our users, internal or external, it's a per-user fee. The value proposition is incredible. What they're giving us for functionality and the ability to do the things that we need to do, they're exceeding my expectations.

Our decision criteria were really based on opportunity and timelines, so I didn't have a lot of other people on our shortlist. OutSystems was one that I had had experience within the past, but their platform didn't really fit what we needed to do. I had some relationships with some folks at Zudy and the speed of trust happened; it didn't take us very long.

We were at the TechEd last year as a prospect. It was about a month after that we signed up, and eleven weeks later they delivered a proof of concept that our current ERP solution provider couldn't do in three years.

If I knew of anybody that was out considering an investment in a low-code or a no-code development platform, I would encourage them to call me and let's have a conversation about how VINYL has changed my ability to lead at IT and it's changed NXC Imaging's ability to run their business.

On a scale from one to ten, I think Zudy VINYL is a nine. It's not quite a ten because it doesn't do everything and it can't write itself, but we've been able to do more things in the last eleven months to make our company run better than previous organizations and teams and applications did in the previous four years.

Our primary use case involves transitioning work that has traditionally been done on spreadsheets. We've used VINYL to connect different systems — especially pulling data from multiple places. Our primary system, as well as just some worksheets that are out there, we were able to pull that all in and view statistics about different things from different places all in one nice view.

An excellent example of the way Zudy VINYL has improved our business is that we can now report on the actual cost of moving a load. We didn't have all that data because it was in too many different places so that we couldn't do a good report without a lot of manual effort. Now it's straightforward. We get a simple report, and this is how much it costs to move this load. And then from that, we can determine profitability. We can now report quickly on the cost of loads. Pulling in costs, for example, such as doing the cost to get a permit if it's an oversized load. We now can roll that in with the rest of the cost of paying the driver and the fuel and whatnot.  

VINYL has improved our ability to deploy apps quickly. If you're talking about some of the things that used to take weeks to accomplish, we can now do them in days. The projects that would take months, now we're looking at weeks.

VINYL has spawned a whole new section of our IT business. It hasn't really focused it, but it's created new ones. Whereas we wouldn't have been attacking these problems before, we now are because we now have a tool we can use to fix things.

There are two most valuable features: one is the ability to pull data from a bunch of different places and put them together. The second is the speed at which you can get a new app developed. Instead of waiting months for this new app to come out, if you have an internal team putting it together, you can roll it out in weeks. I've even seen days. It's incredible how fast you can make changes.

Some new features I'd like to see is visibility into running jobs so that we can see what the status is, or that it's not stuck in its process and doing its thing, or how much longer it's going to take. I'd also like to see a native calendar function so we can put calendars into our apps with maybe even recurring tasks or appointments and that sort of thing. We'd also like to see multi-select lists. The users being able to pick multiple things to filter on and get a list and be able to export that list.

The solution's very stable. We haven't had any major hiccups, downtime or outages with it. We've thrown some things at it. If you get a circular job that's kind of stuck in itself you might have a problem, but that's more the fault of the developer as opposed to the platform.

We're about a year into using the solution. The scalability isn't something we've pushed. We're tipping our toe in the water right now but it's meeting our needs for sure. As much as we've needed to, it's scaled up to it. We can make the solution as big as we want to make it. We're not constrained by a per-user licensing cost or any of those other restrictions as I mentioned.

Tech support has been great for this company. Any problems we've had, we've gotten prompt responses. Tech support for it is top notch. We got some help from Zudy regarding building our first app. They mostly built the first app, and it was rock solid. I guess that's the way they like to do it so we learned some things.

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.

The initial setup was not that complicated. It was basically no more complicated than setting up any web app would be. I wouldn't say it was any more or less than what you would expect.

The licensing costs we pay are, around $5,000 a month. That's every quarter. We've been doing it for about a year now, and the prices have remained steady. We feel it's a reasonable cost for what we're getting because it's unlimited users. It's as big as you want to make it, you're not constrained by a per-user licensing cost or any of those other restrictions, so that's going to stifle your development.

VINYL has increased user satisfaction. We're bringing the users and getting them involved in the development process. We're making fewer mistakes in the process, and we're also getting them excited about it because they can see what's happening and they have their input. It's the features they want, not what IT thinks they want. They get more excited about it.

Our iterations are faster. With VINYL you're talking days or weeks potentially.

Another piece of advice I would give to a colleague researching for a software solution is, if you're looking for something that doesn't require a specialized programming language and you want something that you can develop quickly in, and you want something that's going to pull data from a bunch of different places, I think VINYL's a good option.

I would rate VINYL a nine. Not a 10, because nobody's perfect, but it's going to be huge for us.

We actually have several significant use cases for VINYL. We replaced a few Legacy systems with Zudy and their platform, VINYL, and built from scratch a made to measure system for custom made garments designed in our stores and manufactured by our facilities.

We built an alteration platform that allows us to have customers purchase garments off the rack and then record all of the alterations needed to get the perfect fit, and again, perform those duties elsewhere.

Finally, we use VINYL to develop progressive apps by introducing new functions for our stores and giving them things that they didn't realize they needed. This really saves time and effort on their side so they can focus on what they really should be doing.

VINYL has improved the way our company does business by streamlining and standardizing the processes that are critical for producing garments and altering them, getting all of our stores on the same page with the right processes and the right options that are available to really perform for the customer. 

With the solution improving our satisfaction and adoption of associates in our stores, they have then been able to focus on the customer more, and in turn, improve and increase customer satisfaction and focus on that customer in the store.

VINYL has really helped us speed up application development at a reasonable cost. Previously and with a lot of traditional models, you're talking twelve, sixteen months before you really see the results of all the work that goes in beforehand. With VINYL and working with Zudy, we're able to really go to market with a viable product in a matter of a few months.

Iteratively from there, it's weeks to months before we have new versions instead of another six months or another twelve months for another version. So, it has absolutely sped up things by multiple factors there.

VINYL has benefited our business in a big way and we are very capable of focusing on the customer's needs when using it. One of the benefits for the store associates themselves and working with made to measure was allowing them to have multiple pathways to enter an order for a customer.

Some associates might perform their duty with a customer in one method, but something we recently implemented was more of a customer wishlist function. Whatever fabrics they're interested in, we can set those aside for them in the system. Whether they want to develop a shirt or a suit or a sport coat now, or come back in six months, those are still on their wish list along with the products that they might have selected for that fabric.

Previously you had to start from front to back every step of the way without much flexibility until we said, "we need a more flexible way". Now they have multiple pathways to enter an order, which gives them the strength or the flexibility they need to not have the customer waiting around while they're clicking in a system.

One of the most valuable features of VINYL is its flexibility. We've been able to change direction if needed, once we've learned lessons when we finally started using parts of the product. That flexibility and speed to get to market is really a strength, combined with its ability to connect to other data sources.

It doesn't need to house much data. It's really, really strong in connecting to your other systems or third parties that you might subscribe to and pull it all into one place where you can use it.

The VINYL platform is very stable. We've had minimal issues, and whenever we do, we're able to fix them relatively easily.

VINYL is very scalable, as well. We've started off using VINYL in pilot stores in the Northeast of the United States and expanded to the full U.S. and Canada. Since then, we've actually incorporated users in the Asia/Pacific market, Europe, and we're going to be expanding to China and India as well.

VINYL's tech support and Zudy's tech support is top notch. Whenever we've had any of the issues that I mentioned before, they react quickly and completely to find a solution and work with you to get it done. They understand the urgency. If something isn't the way it should be, getting it solved is their top priority.

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.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward and Zudy helped us scale how large of a system we should have, what type of license would be appropriate, and really ensure that it would grow with us without having to completely re-engineer our setup.

Our licensing costs are approximately 100K annually, and from my perspective, that really is quite the value with the flexibility and what we're getting from the product.

From my perspective at Brooks Brothers, VINYL has had pretty much every function or feature that we've needed. I'm interested to see what they do manage to incorporate on top of that because I'm sure we'll find a use for it.

The VINYL Solution has helped increase productivity at Brooks Brothers. We've been able to standardize our processes in the stores and in our factories with a made to measure solution and alterations. In doing so, we've allowed the business to not worry about those and to focus on growing sales.

This solution has increased our rate of iterations for deploying new releases from six months or twelve months down to two months or six weeks. So, quite the increase of frequency where we're able to deliver new features to the stores.

If researching VINYL versus other similar solutions, I would try to keep in mind really what their strengths are and compare them to each other. From my perspective, the strength of VINYL is clear with its flexibility and its ease of use, ease of development, and that's not to be understated. You can really deliver powerful apps in way less time than other solutions I've seen.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VINYL probably an eight or a nine, simply because of the flexibility and the power that it has in bringing data to one source, and then reacting to it and building an app you need with those data points.