“There are rare opportunities where platforms come by that allow you to really move the needle within your firm. Glide is one of those companies.”
RDG Planning & Design is a multidisciplinary design firm with a large architecture group. At any given time, the firm is running many projects simultaneously, and each project requires lots of data and the management of numerous moving parts. Ron Heims, who oversees technology and practice innovation at RDG, was seeking to develop better apps to run the processes that use that data.
“Prior to Glide, we had been using spreadsheets to collect project information,” said Ron. “We'd send spreadsheets out to our client. We'd get 50, 60 or 70 of these spreadsheets back, and we'd have to recombine all of that data. I thought, there's gotta be a simpler way so the client enters the data online, it goes into a database, and then we can analyze that data directly without having to reenter the data or recombine the spreadsheets.”
RDG began looking for a no-code platform that could handle this process. “The challenge that we ran into was the interface was always clunky or just cumbersome to use,” said Ron. “What we really liked about Glide is that you could build a very intuitive interface for our clients and employees to use, and it was quick to build.”
“Literally within a week, I built a way better app than I had using another platform. And the people I shared it with were blown away by how incredibly intuitive and easy the new app was.”
Replacing clipboards with a mobile app
RDG has a project doing master planning for a city’s parks. It requires their team to be out in the field inspecting existing infrastructure and assessing their needs. Previously, this required taking notes on paper with clipboards in the field and importing those notes later at the office. It was laborious and one of the project managers asked Ron if there was a better way to do it.
“I put together an app in about a day and a half that would allow them to use their phone, go out to the site, pull up the park that was already imported into the app, and then add information about the park,” explained Ron.
“It allows all the data to stay connected around the project. I was able to make that process much more efficient. ”
Now, they don't have to take pictures and try to match photographs to descriptions of things they wrote down. They can pull up a park in the app and add notes and photographs directly to the park profile. He even added a generate report button inside the app that would automatically create a rough draft based on the data in the profile, saving their project managers time.
“When you factor in the AI we can use in our apps now, we have a whole new world where we can create and write reports using information that was a lot harder to get to without using the tools that are in Glide,” he added.
RDG’s Glide apps save time and increase productivity
“The main benefit we get out of Glide is the ROI of time saved. ”
“We were able to put together apps that streamline our processes very quickly and they’ve helped our staff to be more productive,” said Ron. Deploying Glide apps across the business has helped RDG use data better while also reducing the time they spend managing that data. “We now have more efficient processes that people can use quickly and easily. They can capture information that goes back into our systems without a lot of extra effort.”
Now, when people come to Ron with a new problem they're trying to solve, he has a tool that allows him to quickly and efficiently develop a tool to solve that problem.
“As an architecture firm, designing buildings IS a complex thing,” said Ron. “There are lots of players involved in the process, lots of systems, lots of data, and there's always a need to create new ways to gather, analyze, and use that data. Glide is helping us to make those processes simpler, and it has powerful tools that allow us to integrate into systems that we currently have. We're not just recreating a silo of data. We're actually able to tap into the existing data that's there, pull it into a Glide app, and then update, add to, or create more information with that data.”
Developing more tools for processes in need of improvement
“Initially, when I found Glide, I found it for the purpose of solving one problem,” said Ron, “but I very quickly realized that there was a lot more opportunity with this platform. So far, we've already built eight apps that we've launched, and we have about four more that we're building and beta testing right now. I've got a list of ten or twelve more that we'd like to create in the near future.”
RDG is using apps for things like quality control, project management, and general process improvement for different pieces of the puzzle of designing a building.
Expense Tracker:
The RDG Expense Tracker app allows team members to take a picture of their credit card receipt using their phone. This app uses AI to extract the company name, amount, and receipt date. Because it integrates with their accounting system, the app can pull in a user's timesheet project information for the last 60 days, so they can easily tag it to the project and a category. “One of my beta testers told me that this app saves him probably two to three hours a month over Expensify. When you multiply that by the approximately 50 credit cards in our company, that’s a hundred and fifty hours a month. Looking at employees’ billable rate, financially, those savings add up very quickly.”
Education Request Portal:
This app tracks continuing education requests across the firm. It centralizes the process so that employees can submit requests through a portal and managers can approve or schedule education courses, budget resources, and allocate time easily. The app helps RDG support ongoing improvement in their team's education. “Our studio managers and leadership absolutely loved it right away,” said Ron. “ They said we need to make more things like this.”
Design Narrative App:
The Design Narrative App is used to collect data about projects from employees. Previously, that data would have gone through their accounting system, which wasn't easy or intuitive. The design narrative app has simple, specific fields that they need to fill in. It is used to capture the scope of a project, identify problems to solve, and explain the design intent. Inside the app, it uses Glide AI to convert that information into text, automatically building a first draft of a project profile that they can use for marketing purposes.
“I really think we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg of what's possible with the platform.”