Low Code Solutions: Identifying and Implementing Your Use Case

Evolving market demands have forced businesses to shorten timelines for completing projects and delivering products. As a result, companies have begun to tap low-code solutions to tighten work cycles and raise their business value for the long haul.

As the name implies, low-code platform solutions provide organizations with tools they can use to develop and deploy customized applications with little or no coding. Compared to traditional software development that involves line-by-line coding, low-code solutions feature a visual interface with pre-built modules and drag-and-drop editors. These components make it quick and easy to make changes during and after the app’s development, so they can suit the unique needs of your company. Moreover, you and your team can tweak the app as your business scales.

Benefits of using a low-code solution

Low-code tools positively impact businesses in the following ways:

1. Empower non-IT staff

Most low-code development platforms need little to zero coding experience, allowing line of business staff to create apps according to their requirements. However, assistance from those with programming knowledge may be required when fine-tuning controls or functionalities.

2. Give more value for your money

The subscription fees involved in paying for access to development platforms is lower than the cost of hiring developers or designing apps from scratch.

3. Shorten the development cycle for apps

The pre-built frameworks that low-code platform solutions offer hasten app development. This frees up your developers' time for tasks that are more crucial to your growth strategy.

4. Help streamline operations

Low-code improves the synergy among front, middle and back office functions:

• Back office - Low-code tools can automate manual and merge disconnected tasks under legacy systems.
• Middle office - Low-code business solutions enable the resulting app to easily integrate with your main platforms (such as task management and customer relations software). This integration can boost internal communication and productivity.
• Front office: Low-code platforms allow developers and business users to collaborate, resulting in apps that are tailor-fitted to improve workforce and customer experience on multiple channels or devices.

How to leverage low-code solutions for your business

Taking the following steps can enable your low-code platform solution to enhance your competitive edge:

1. Review your current digital assets

Evaluate how your current systems are fulfilling your business needs from developing responsive end-user experiences to capturing data needed for growth insights. You can also use analytics to uncover the pain points and bottlenecks in your business operations.

Here are some areas are worth looking into:

• Granting approvals and exceptions (example: Completing purchase requests)
• Collecting data from users, apps, or third-party systems and acting on them (example: Uploading bank statement information from an email to one's enterprise resource planning platform.)
• Gathering insights from raw data (example: Detecting outliers or even fake reviews among product reviews from multiple websites)

2. Identify your technological gaps

List down the data requirements and new applications that you couldn't currently source or develop, whatever the reason—unavailable or inadequate IT skills, limitations of existing app development tools, inefficient workflow, or budget constraints.

3. Include business users in the development process

Your company's internal users are the so-called experts in the workflows of their respective departments. Thus, their ideas and input are necessary for ensuring the success of apps in live environments.

4. Apply low-code development to address these gaps

Find out how you can build an app to solve your data sourcing and productivity needs using low-code technology. Then prototype and test the app, which can sit on top of legacy applications or allow data migration from the old to the new app for more efficient work operations.

The popularity of low-code continues to soar and this technology is expected to power 70% of new applications by 2025.