Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

We are using it for headcount, some dashboarding, and centralized reporting for various departments.

In one group, we created an application which helps provide insight into profitability per salesperson. For each of their orders/customers, where is the best profitability? Where are the low margins? This has been transformative.

It is flexible and versatile. You can connect to multiple data sources or databases concurrently, which is very useful. You don't have to extract and load or build a data warehouse, if you don't want to. You can attach to databases live and pull data live wherever it is. It can be in the cloud, on-premise, or on a subsidiary's premise. You can get at them all. You're not just stuck with doing redundant copies of data.

We find it is easy to learn and use, and the user interface is easy to pick up. We have trained some of our own people to be able to do apps with VINYL. Therefore, we can turn things around quickly.

Once or twice, when a new version of VINYL comes out, it has had a negative impact on a feature. However, we do everything in a test environment. Unless we miss something in test, we don't go live with it if it isn't perfect. Zudy hasn't had too many stumbles along the way, but there have been a couple times, and it's been minor.

I haven't seen any limitations to the scalability, and we have demanded a lot.

Everyone at my current location has access to the product via the Intranet, about a few hundred people.

We find the team members who work with us from Zudy catch on to business issues and processes quickly. They make good suggestions and are excellent listeners, which distinguishes them from more than 90 percent of the rest of the consultants and service providers out there. These people listen and do what you ask them to do. It's truly a distinguishing characteristic.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The implementation team was a combination of Zudy's and our technical teams.

I have two Zudy staff full-time onsite for deployment and maintenance, plus my own team.

Pricing and licensing are expensive.

I did evaluate other competitors.

Consider Zudy, at least when you are getting started, because their people listen and deliver what you ask them to do.

We love the tool. I like it enough to introduce it to another division of the company. 

They have added some security features at our specific request. We are told that other customers are very receptive to those security features.

We have had minimal problems with the product and a high degree of success with their consultants, service providers, and technical support people. In addition, the success that we have experienced with recommendations that we've suggested to improve the product. They are easy and fantastic to do business with. They don't have to be micromanaged.

We are using it for workflow management and transportation.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and rapid development. We need to be able to find stuff quickly and produce solutions to our users. We are a quickly changing, rapidly integrating company. Therefore, this solution allows us to keep pushing forward and ensures our continuous improvement.

On the development side, we would like to see continued improvement on the visibility of the subqueries, as we are building applications. E.g., I would like to have more visualization in the back-end of the data objects and how they are interrelated.

The interface has had a lot of changes to it. It is better than it was before. However, with the subqueries in particular, this has been the most difficult part of the interface.

I would like them to build out more tools for communication, particularly the ability to do a multinode panel via email.

We have had no performance issues with it.

It is very scalable from its licensing to design. We have not had any performance issues when scaling.

I do think we may need to consider using a different server, but I don't think that is anything against Zudy.

We have not had to use their technical support. 

We have spoken with their consultants and developers though, who have been responsive and know what they are doing. Early on, we requested things to be added to the firmware, and it was added in a week or two.

They have some online training material. They have courses that they do in person. They also make stuff available online. I have had some white papers provided to me by the consultants, which were understandable and clear.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward. The data connections simply pull in data, and it took five minutes to start building an app.

It's easy to understand the basics and learn from other examples. However, it takes a bit of experience to know everything that it's capable of doing.

It was a slow roll out. VINYL was the cause of it.

We have probably been using it in production for a year, but have had no issues in product. 

We have seen a 30 percent decrease in time for some of our workflows.

As far as connectivity and ease of use, nobody else was doing anything better.

We're a tour company and we have a schedule of several hundred tour managers who are managing all the tours that we operate. All of their schedules for the year are put in here. We also manage all of their quality surveys. We ask for quality surveys and we get those back. They're not stored here, but they're reported out here. We also manage any guest comments in here. And the big one is reconciling all the tour funds. That's not active yet, but it's being tested right now, and that will go active and live in November. So, there's a lot that's happening with this.

To me, the most important piece is going to be the funding, the reconciliation, because right now it's a very manual process, and this will automate it. It's going to make it a lot more streamlined. It's going to be a lot quicker for people to process it and, therefore, get money back. It's efficient and I like that. They'll be able to just take a snapshot of the receipt and upload it into the system, and then it just all gets submitted. It's cleaner and it will be a lot smoother process.

Zudy has created a platform that will make us much more efficient, with everything in one place. It's a much better way of reporting out. It leaves less room for any human error. I think it will be great. The piece that I'm talking about, specifically, is the funding reconciliation, but in general, all of the other things that they've done so far have been super helpful.

The way that they've done some of the reports, they've created really great data dumps. If I want to see a snapshot of something for a given timeframe, I can download it. From that download, I can create further analysis or do my own thing with it, which is really helpful. I'm even able to go back several years and get data. So when I'm doing a comparison of year over year, I am able to do it just from what they have done, what they have created for us.

In terms of it being easy to learn, it's logical so it makes sense of things. The steps are pretty logical and the display is very user-friendly. A "pencil" means "write," i.e. that you are able to write. So it's clear. It's not ambiguous, what you can and what you can't do on it. 

In the beginning, we were working with it while it was still being tweaked. So sometimes things weren't working 100 percent, or they were working but, because they were being tested behind the scenes, some things were kind of funky. But, just a quick email to them saying, "Is this correct?" would usually have a really logical answer, and then it would be fixed.

It's pretty much a stable product. I haven't seen many issues with it. I do know that there have been some smaller issues with some new people that are also starting to work on it, and their name being in the system, but I haven't been involved in that part of it.

So far, so good. I haven't seen anything that it hasn't been able to handle, but the real test will happen in November when we have several hundred people on it, adding their funds and trying to process or submit their funds.

I can tell you that I really appreciate Martin and Grant, the two guys who have been helping us in developing this. They have been really outstanding. You ask for something, you ask for a specific design, that you want to see something, and they get it. They just give you what you need. It's been really great. It's been a great pleasure working with them.

Whenever I have a request such as, "It would be great to have this," I've been able to send an email to Martin. He has come back and said, "Yeah, we could do that." And, he just does it. There's really not much room for improvement for me, because I feel that is great: To be able to ask for something, and then he immediately just gets it to us. That's been quite helpful.

Their overall support is a ten out of ten. They have been very supportive. If you ask them for something, and they're able to deliver, they do. And if they can't deliver, they just are straightforward and tell you that they can't do that.

I came into the project after it had already started, so I only got, if not end result, the "first draft." It was pretty clear. There were some things that we suggested be changed and they were super helpful about that.

Have meetings with the developers, and make sure that you're clear on exactly what you need before you start to have them develop it. Be really clear.

I would give VINYL an eight out of ten, and I would say that it's great. The eight is because it's pretty user-friendly, it's clean, and it's reliable. I don't know if there are other things out there that are better than this, but for what we have needed so far, based on what I've seen so far, this is pretty helpful.

We use it mainly for financial reporting. It helps us see our net margins in detail, net margin by customer, by category. It allows us to see our sales in more detail, and same-day versus a couple weeks after month-end closes, for example. But we mainly use it for financial purposes.

It has been very beneficial. We have quite a few people using it who would always rely on the finance team to merge Excel spreadsheets, merge data from multiple sources, and then provide a final report to them for whatever turnaround period was required. But now they're able to just go to the website and see what they need right away. If it's data they want to download instead of just seeing it in a final report, they can do that.

Overall, "numbers on demand" has been a really big change for us. VINYL has been able to pull information from a couple of sources, and stuff that would end up just being in giant Excel spreadsheets otherwise, we're able to have it available immediately.

It's also helped the accounting department, specifically, for our month-ends. We still have to validate all our numbers manually, but we compare our numbers now to VINYL and make sure all our manual calculations are in line with VINYL. It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting.

It has made us clean up our data too, to make sure VINYL can read it. We have to make sure we're consistent with how we input our data and categorize everything. We've been able to really expand our reporting and see net margins in so many more ways than we were able to before.

In addition, we've been using a distributor that will send us just giant spreadsheets weekly, of all the data, of all the sales, item by item. The biggest value for us has been the ability for VINYL to do massive revenue recognition for us, every day. That's been the biggest advantage for us, being able to pull this data in every day. Previously, this was something we were only doing at the end of every month.

It's customizable to whatever you might use it for, so I don't know about specific features. It's specific to our needs. But I've gone in and I've learned it myself a little bit, with their help. I've gone to some of the Zudy training for VINYL.

As far as features go, it's the ability for me to go in and see what's going on when I need to. And to be able to start to do some back-end programming of it myself. That's been nice too.

It's very user-friendly, and the front-end is exactly what we need to see, very simple. It can get more complicated too, if those are the needs.

I would love to have the home screen a little more customizable because, as we're building more and more reports, it would be nice to have more options in how they're organized on the screen.

I'm not sure if this is something they could do, but if we had it more customizable for different departments - if sales saw it one way, whereas finance had something different than sales - that would be helpful. We also have a few companies within Elite Group that are using it so more customization could be nice.

It's never been down. The only time we've had issues is if we change something, and then it messes something up in the back-end. But that's always been our fault. Generally, VINYL has really helped us to find our own user errors. We've found more of our own problems than we've ever found with VINYL.

We have three years of data in there. It has handled it well. All our limitations, as far as data is concerned, have been related to the file size. We export things from VINYL into Excel and Excel has a maximum. We can't go over 500,000 lines. I don't think any of our scalability issues have stemmed from VINYL itself.

We keep adding companies to it, and that's been no problem but we're not a huge company. We haven't had any problems with scalability. It's not a problem to add users. It's really quick. That's never caused a problem.

I deal with a lot of people at VINYL. We have our consultants, a couple guys at VINYL, and we talk once a week. If there are any issues I go directly to them. There's also a trainer I've been in contact with when it was less specific to our use of VINYL and just a general VINYL question. 

Everyone has been extremely helpful and friendly. We've never had a problem with them fixing what needs to be fixed. They know what's priority. They know our Friday management report is the most important thing for us and, whatever we do - any changes we make to VINYL - we have to make sure the Friday management report goes out smoothly and as expected.

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 involved in getting it to go live. We had a lot of logic to build into it, and that's when I was brought on, to find ways to work with them, to figure out how to go from what's in our system to what the actual correct numbers should be.

It was easy to learn to use. What they present is final. You don't have that many ways to use it. It's not like a major ERP system where you have all these options, all these different menus that you can go through. What's presented on the screen is a report. For me, it's pretty intuitive if I want to change the date range, if I want to change what customer I'm looking at. I don't think anyone else has mentioned to me not finding it intuitive or finding issues with the navigation. It's a pretty straightforward tool, so I find it quite easy to work with.

It's valuable for all of us, in terms of our time. It has saved us time.

Discuss your needs with them, make sure they understand the end goal. Then they can customize it to your needs. With us, we kept changing what we wanted, how to use it, so we had to keep going back to the drawing board. But they're extremely willing to find a way to make what you want, as long as they know what you want.

There is some patience required in getting it set up because it's different for everyone. Everyone uses it differently, so you do have to be patient with the initial setup process. When I was brought on it was because we had to find a way to go from our system, take our numbers, and figure out what it was we wanted to see on the screen, and how we could get them from our system into VINYL. We don't really do inventory the normal way with our company, so we had to find a way to get inventory displayed through VINYL.

Be patient and communicate, explain what your needs are, and figure out where the data come from in your system to be able to project it into VINYL. The way we use it is so heavy on finance. We need our numbers to be precise. Everything comes down to precision and numbers for us. We're able to get that and it's helped us for sure.

I really like VINYL. I would rate it a nine out of ten. I see the advantage of it and I also see so many ways we could use it more here. I want to keep pushing for us to use it in more ways because I can see how it can be so beneficial if we start pulling in other systems.

The fun part is, the messier it feels for us, the more excited they sound at wanting to solve the problem.

This solution has touched many parts of the organization, everything from a dashboard for some of the store analytics, to custom applications for alterations, made-to-measure, clienteling, inventory management. It really covers the whole gamut.

It has removed many manual processes and allowed us to automate. It has reduced paper connected with things we do in our stores, such as alterations and made-to-measure customers. Not only does it help with efficiency for the employees, but it's also a better experience for the customer.

It has really been an evolution for the organization. We didn't see it as just a project where you do the project and stop. We're always looking at how do we continuously improve parts of our processes and operations. That's really the way we continue to approach it: How can the tool keep helping us to innovate and drive new solutions in other areas?

The fact that it's no-code is one of the most important features because it allows us to deliver very quickly. We can get the value to the business delivered much more quickly than with other solutions.

This is just a pie in the sky wish list, but if they could add a machine-learning type of platform to go with it, or some artificial intelligence capabilities, so that as it’s collecting data it would also be turning some of that into insights, that would be something. That's a pretty ambitious request because I realize you will need different tools, but that would be a nice to have.

There have been no stability issues. It's all in the cloud. We've never had any outage. It's very stable. 

For us, it has scaled for over 6,000 users globally, and there have been no issues.

The tech support is very good. We haven't had to use tech support very much, but when we do, things are resolved on the first call. That is the result you always want to have. You don't want to keep having to call over and over and deal with the same issue. We're very satisfied.

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.

The setup was very quick. We actually delivered our first pilot within two weeks. In that time, we had the first application use case running in a few stores.

Regarding the setup itself, it took only a couple of hours to install it.

It's very easy to learn the platform. We have business users who have taken on roles now where they maintain and make changes to the platform. You really don't need to be a programmer.

Our return on investment is orders of magnitude more than what we paid for the software. I don't know an exact number, but what I will tell you is that if you look at the cost of the platform, before we had it we would probably spend that much in just one month in inefficiencies in our processes. Being able to clean that up, if you take that over the four years we've been using it, that's a huge return. Even if you extrapolate it out on an annual basis, return on investment is more than 10x.

I would say that we have probably easily had a return of 12 to 15 times more than what we have spent. It's a very solid ROI.

I feel the product’s pricing is a good value.

The licensing model is very straightforward. You license the platform and you can build however many solutions you want with it. I like that model.

We looked at numerous other applications from some of the larger software providers. Because we have 6,000 users, all of the other applications and tools got very expensive from a licensing standpoint. An additional issue was that the other applications, from a data standpoint, needed to create another data store and co-locate all of the data. That was another drawback. We did do several other proofs of concept with larger players, but our needs were not going to be met by them in a cost-effective way.

I have not seen a tool that is really on this level. There may be a lot of other tools that do parts of what this tool does, or there might be tools that do all of it, but the time to value and the time to implement is much longer, and it's a more complex implementation. To me, speed and simplicity are really the two biggest things that VINYL has in terms of a leg up on the competition.

The product itself is very solid. The places where we've had issues are internal, with regards to a cultural mindset shift, because the business was not used to getting solutions this quickly. They have to think differently about how they engage with these projects. They have to move into more of an agile mindset and move away from the old waterfall mindset of saying, “Hey, if we're going to do this design for three months, build for three months, test three months, then in nine months we'll get a tool.” Instead, these are rapid sprints where, every few weeks, we're delivering new capability. That, to me, has been the biggest adjustment for us.

The technology piece is relatively straightforward. It's really the change management and people management that you have to work on.

Make sure your business is ready for it. People have to be willing to move quickly and change their way of thinking so that you can deliver value incrementally, as opposed to trying to boil the ocean and do everything in one go over nine to 12 months.

We've been very happy with it. I would give it a nine out of 10. I never give anyone a 10. I think for every product there are things they can continue to build that will help the customer. I'm sure there are other things Zudy could do which would give us even more things we could do with it.

We use it to build applications that help us facilitate moving data between different systems, and also for pulling together disparate data sources into one place where so that it is easy to look at.

We have a lot of events. With our Jingle Ball events we have 12 concerts all over the country over the Christmas season. There is a lot of advertising across those and sponsorships as well. It's really complicated, operationally, to manage. It was historically managed in spreadsheets and Google Docs. We were able to move everything into a VINYL application and it's helped us understand more.

It has helped us standardize some processes that were very haphazard. It has helped us put some more rigor and clarity around certain things that were done very manually on Excel spreadsheets regarding processes. Now we know what local markets versus national might be selling in terms of assets against the events. And it just gives us better business intelligence.

The key thing is not that it did anything that you couldn't do another way. It was more the fact that it was very easy to get this built up and running quickly, and it's not a headache to maintain like a lot of other traditional IT platforms are.

In some cases, it's not a question of whether VINYL does something that other software doesn't do, it's a question of how it does it and the ease with which it does. With Zudy's consultancy, we were able to go from an idea to having a proof of concept in a couple of weeks, to let everybody see what we were going to do. That would have taken a lot longer using traditional coding technology.

The Lite Integration is really the key thing. You're able to attach the VINYL software to a variety of different systems very easily and pull data together in a way that is really difficult to do using traditional technology. That's really the key, core functionality that really makes the software very useful.

Also, the fact that it's a no-code platform also makes it easier for people to understand and deal with internally, to continue to build applications and modify existing applications.

When we started with them the platform was brand new. There were - I don't want to say deficiencies - just things they didn't have yet. We worked a lot with them on security and some other things. And they've continually updated the platform to include new features and functionality.

One of the things that was lacking for a while, although it continues to get better, is the user interface. It was built more "functionally." It was better for functionality than it was for being pretty, from the standpoint of the user. They've done a lot of work there, but I think there's probably a little more work to do, continually.

Also, while some of the reporting functionality is adequate, reporting needs to continue to be worked on, given the fact that there are a lot of really good reporting tools out there.

But, for a product of its age and life cycle position, they are super-responsive to what the clients need. And as they add more clients, certain clients will say, "Hey, I really need this feature functionality," and they'll build it into the suite. Then everybody has access to it, which is great.

Stability is not an issue. We run it in AWS and we've never had any stability issues with it at all. We haven't had instances of it going down. It's possible that has happened, but nothing has been brought to my attention. Typically, if there was a problem, I would hear about it.

We have not pressure-tested it enough. The applications that we have in it are not super heavy in terms of bandwidth and we haven't had any issues. I don't think we're pushing enough volume through the app to test the scalability.

Tech support has been super-responsive. We've generally had a retainer agreement for consulting hours, so we get what we need really quickly.

In full disclosure, I have a strong relationship with senior management. One of the reasons we were an early adopter is that I know the owners of the company. I know the CEO. He brought us in. I have direct access to the owners and the senior management team whenever I need to. If we have a problem, I get whatever I need.

But the team and the consultants underneath have been really responsive. At this stage, I'm really outside the process now because the IT team runs it and they deal with it. I'm hearing no complaints, so I assume support is what it needs to be. People would come to me if there was something that was an issue. But it's been running really smoothly for quite a bit of time.

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.

The setup was pretty easy. Initially, they did the setup for us. They hosted it in their own AWS instance. And somewhere around 12 to 18 months ago we moved it over to our own AWS instance, and that was fairly seamless from what I was told. We really haven't had any issues with it at all.

The technical setup was pretty clean. We were up and running pretty quickly. We got in and they merged everything into our single sign-on process really well. There were no issues that I know of.

From what my people have told us, it's easy to learn. We've had some Finance people learn it, as well as some people on the IT side.

It's hard to say what our ROI is, but VINYL has certainly helped us. Our investment has been limited and we've gotten good process benefits out of it. I can't really say in dollars and cents, but it's certainly helped us improve rigor and process in a number of areas.

We haven't done the calculations because this wasn't one of those things where I said, "I'm going to go spend this money and then I'm going to save some money somewhere else." This was more about fixing a broken process than it was about trying to save money.

Pricing was actually one of the things that drew us to the product initially. At the time there was another platform called OutSystems that we looked at. At the time, because OutSystems was a little more mature, there was a thought from our IT team that they would have preferred to use OutSystems vs VINYL. But the way it was licensed at the time, I got a flat monthly fee from Zudy for the VINYL product, which allowed me to basically have unlimited use of it. That was really helpful.

I know that some of the competition or competitor sites or products were priced on the number of seats, the number of people accessing it at any given time. Given that I have a company that is north of 10,000 people, those sorts of licensing issues can get prohibitively expensive, especially if you have a product that's going to hit fairly widely across the enterprise. So the pricing mechanism from a licensing perspective was very attractive.

We have an annual license, we pay monthly. It's very competitive and very worthwhile given the return we get out of it. I don't know if my pricing is different or better or worse than other customers', considering we were an early adopter.

The key thing here is that the pricing is just one price. We can do as much or as little with the product as we want to which is very attractive. I don't have to worry about if I build a new app, I have to pay more. Or, if I put 20 more people logging into the app, I don't have to pay any extra for that either. That makes it really easy for us to use internally, without having to worry about that sort of thing.

We looked at OutSystems. There were a couple of other tools out there that we looked at.

As a Finance person, all I can say is anecdotally what I've heard from the IT people. Overall, we're happy with the tool. I have not had people come to me and say we should drop this and do something else. But I couldn't really comment deeply on how it compares to the competition. All I know is that we're happy with what we have.

You need to have buy-in from both the business team and the IT team. Anytime you implement a new platform like this, if you don't have people internally who are going to embrace the product, it's going to fail.

I'd call VINYL an eight out of 10. It does what it's supposed to do. It continues to improve. We're getting good usage out of it, and I think it's a great value for the price.

I use it for business process automation across a variety of areas. I am in charge of commercial IT and we have used this technology to enhance some of the commercial business processes.

In my current organization, we are using it in account planning, incentive compensation, field communications via SMS alerts, and onboarding of employees.

The ability to build apps quickly by connecting to almost any data source, while having workflow and routing, really give you the ability to enhance more static systems and drive value to the business.

• Ability to connect to disparate data sources
• The workflow engine
• Speed and agility in building apps

Perhaps the UI could be improved.

There have been no stability issues. It is a very stable platform.

No issues with scalability.

The support team always makes itself available and drives resolutions quicker than we can typically keep up. It is really excellent.

Their services are excellent. They typically provide a team of resources to get the environment set up and help build your first app.

Pricing is less than the cost of a consultant and the value you receive is much greater.

We looked at other middleware products but liked the unique capabilities of this one.

Try it. Sometimes, the use cases are not evident. Start slow and pilot it and the value becomes evident.

We use it for different applications. We're doing some dashboarding, some demo tracking, some commission. So far, those are the three applications that have been working for us, or are in the works.

It gives us an accurate idea of where we stand as a business, on many different levels. It also gives our sales department more of an idea of how they are doing for the month, every month. And it gives us more capabilities within our systems to pull information out. It's just a better, more accurate, and faster system.

This is like having an application within your business and it's a totally different premise, rather than having to go in and have all this coding done, which just takes so long. And everything else is done by spreadsheets. You don't want to stare at a spreadsheet all day long, because there are a million of them and there could be errors. The idea of there being errors is less likely than it used to be.

• Ease of use
• Easily accessible

We've been on a hold with one of the products that we started with, which was one of our processes. It just wasn't capable of doing it. It could extract it but it couldn't get the information back in internally, correctly. And that's just because our system is old.

No issues with stability. It is very much a stable product.

The first project we gave them, our biggest, was the problem. It wasn't able to do it but, as I said, the system we were using was too old, and they're too advanced.

We have a guy that comes to our office every Wednesday and he's easily accessible at any hour, any day of the week. If there is a tech problem, he deals with our IT department directly. Honestly, everything is quick. I think because of the way our world is nowadays, where everything is so easily accessible, and being accessible even on a weekend makes it that much better.

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

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex at all. We're not delving into the learning of how to use it yet. We have somebody in-house who is trying to learn it, but we have other projects going on, so it's taken a back-burner. But, as I said, its accessibility is very easy.

You always look for the underlying cost, there's always underlying costs but the value is fine. I don't think it should cost any more. You pay for the software but you're also paying for their employees, when they work onsite for you.

Licensing is fine. We have to finalize the agreement once a year and that's pretty much it. Otherwise, it's ours and we can do whatever we want with it.

We did look at other options but they don't have the flexibility that this does. This has a lot of flexibility.

They give you a free trial of what it can do. Go in with something that's easier, not harder, because that is going to give you an idea of what it can do, and you can basically work from that point on.

I rate it an eight out of 10. There is always room for improvement. If they could just make it a little bit easier for the customer to learn how to use it themselves, that would make it better.

Our primary use case is scheduling. We do a lot of scheduling and collecting of survey data.

The tour managers are able to view their results - versus having to wait two times a year to get their results - they can review them in real time. They're also able to instantly receive their schedules versus having to manually send them via an Excel grid. It's also able to distinguish what type of guide we are using.

The fact it connects to all of our systems outside of Zudy. It connects with our internal systems and it makes things more productive and not manual.

The calendar has room for improvement, but that's what they're going to be working on next: making a Gantt chart.

It is a stable product for the most part, but if there are any issues their developers are instantly available to address them.

There have been no scalability issues. It handles a lot of stuff. It replaced two of our programs.

Their technical support is awesome. I work exclusively with their technical department and they're able to turn things around super quick and make changes and adjustments. Nothing takes very long, usually, and they're always available.

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.

The setup was a little complex, but not that bad. I had Zudy specifically here. I was working with two of the developers and they were with me every step of the way.

The sky is the limit. It is able to pretty much do anything and everything that you thought a computer couldn't do. You should just really embrace it. It took me a while to embrace it but they're a really great company to work with.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. I think a Gantt chart would probably put it to a nine. I don't think anything's ever perfect. I'm feeling concerned about when we end our relationship directly with Zudy and just work with our own IT department, how quick the changes will be. 

Overall, it's a really great product. It's able to tie into different departments. From my understanding, it's what they were intending for this. We're able to use it across the board, all the departments.

Often times, the expression "spreadsheet hell" is thrown around our walls, and people get too entrenched in sharing, emailing, creating, and saving spreadsheets just to share information. The Zudy product, Vinyl, has really allowed us to get out of spreadsheets and start to build dashboards for information which needs to be shared. In that sense, we have grown as a business in directions which are scalable for us in the future. 

• You do not need to be a programmer to use it or build something in it. This is pretty important in our business.
• You can unite data which lives in different sources without moving that data. This have been a real game changer for us.
• Our partnership with Zudy has really worked out for us.

The most meaningful improvement might be done in some of the aesthetics of the reporting and dashboarding. We unify and unite data in ways which are flexible and usable, but do not always have the aesthetics of some of the other reporting platforms out there. If it could be prettier, it might be a bit more attractive on the business side.

For us, it is very stable. We can host it internally and in the cloud. It is secure and accessible. We have been using this product for about a year and a half, and we have only seen improved sustained stability and usable.

The product's evolution to this point has proven that it is becoming more scalable.

We are still a small enough business that it meets our needs today, but the improvements that I have seen in Vinyl mean that we will be using this product for years.

The support from Zudy has been tremendous. The people that we have worked with (not just Tommy, Trish, and Charles), but the people in our business probably think Martin works for our company. It would not surprise me based on the number of times that we see him walking the halls and solving problems for people with this platform. Whenever we reach out, we receive someone who is friendly and competent. 

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.

I was not involved in the day-to-day of the initial setup, therefore it is hard for me to comment. However, I know that we were successful with it. Probably any limitations that we had at setup were due to some of the friction that we have internally in our network.

I would rate the product a nine out of 10, because I always leave room for improvement. I do not have any gripes. When you discuss the triumvirate of people, process, and technology, it has worked out for us in those regards. I have optimism for the future, but I am excited for what they will improve.