This is Why You Need to Invest in Internal Tools
Empowering our non technical team members to self serve data fix operations using internal tools
What are internal tools?
Imagine having a self service set of tools where non-technical people can undertake the end to end workflows that they need to perform their jobs. We’ve all been there when engineering teams have built features in a product or platform but forget about the ongoing support and maintenance of it and how it fits within the operational context of a business.
Internal tools help with being able to do CRUD operations. What are CRUD operations? Create, Read, Update and Delete: the core basic functions required for data operations. Sometimes these simple things can take some time to build out. Being in a startup or scaleup means time is our most valuable asset. So enabling our team to be effective as quickly as possible is the culture of our company. Technology enables us to grow and operate faster and efficiently.
What motivated AgriDigital to go for Internal tools?
As a data engineer, I love solving problems that help the business, our teams and importantly our customers grow and have great experiences. Our Core Squad identified several opportunities to help our non technical team remove dependency on engineering team. Internal tools gave us an opportunity to empower business team to resolve problems themselves, while at the same time relieving our engineering team to work on higher value business outcomes.
We saw that time and time again, there were team members who were spending time on mundane processes that could be easily automated one step at a time. This directly resulted in their abilities not being utilised in the right areas of the business at the right time. A business must utilise the full potential of all its team members by finding opportunities to automate where possible or where we believe would be of higher value. As a company we want to move to a proactive approach to identify and remove redundancies rather than being reactive. We’ve all been there and don’t like working on problems after they occur!
What options exist for Internal tools?
There are many options you could pick from. Our criteria was very simple:
- Open source to allow us to “own” the service and ensure that our sensitive data is never leaving our platform.
- Low cost to ensure we don’t have high operating costs.
- Low code / no code to enable non-technical people to get instant value.
Based on these criteria we narrowed down on three offerings in the market:
Budibase
ToolJet
Appsmith
I’m not going to go into the full details about each of them, however I will talk more about why we chose Appsmith as our way forward.
Why did we select AppSmith?
Appsmith explains on their website that they are “A powerful open source framework to build internal tools. Quickly build any custom business software with pre-built UI widgets that connect to any data source. Control everything with Javascript.”
This is so true!
What I love about Appsmith:
It’s intuitive!
- It’s so easy for anyone to set up in the first place. Quite simply, it was just going directly to the AWS marketplace and selecting their pre-existing supported AMI and spinning up an EC2. Instantly it was up and running. After tweaking some basic infrastructure configuration, I was able to obtain secure SSL certificate and domain, set it up using our existing security groups and within 30 mins everything was up and running.
- Creating applications is so simple. They have pre-built widgets that can be placed in a page with simple drag and drop action. Connecting to sources is super simple. You even have the ability to create a pre-made “form” simply by connecting a source and using their wizard to auto generate the CRUD operations instantly. It’s actually quite impressive!
- Team and organisation management is well thought out and makes it simple to provide secure access to internal team members without them having to worry about breaking an internal app.
- Since it’s open source, it means we host it and there are no limits on the number of apps that we can make. They do offer a cloud version for those that want instant access, however for us at AgriDigital we needed to ensure the security and privacy of our data. Our customers rely on AgriDigital for a trusted and secure platform for all inventory across the supply chain. Appsmith helps us continue to deliver this promise while enabling our team to operate faster and more efficiently.
What is my initial feedback about using AppSmith?
Honestly, I’m blown away by how easy it is. Their documentation is fantastic. Their support is timely and responsive. They have tutorial videos to help guide us through the entire process.
So far the only limitation that I’ve found is that you have to learn Javascript to be able to do some complex operations. However this is still not that bad, considering how much time it has saved already. Fortunately, we have resources with Javascript capability in our team. Hence the learning curve has not been too much of an issue for me.
Now this is both a positive and negative…they provide a managed AWS AMI for EC2. Which is great in one aspect because we get automatic updates to the product and offering. Bad because we don’t know when these updates occur and could break things that we have built. We experienced this with one of our micro-apps that connected directly to an S3 bucket. The latest update was automatically applied, but it immediately broke one of our micro-apps. However, as I mentioned above, their support is pretty good. They picked it up and fixed it quickly.
So far investing the time to get an internal tool set up has been very helpful and valuable for our teams. For example, introducing this internal self service tool, means our customer support team has reduced their time for completion of a support ticket such as updating customer details, from a 2 day turnaround time to under 5 mins! A whopping 586% increase in turnaround speed! This adds up across the year!
Where to from here?
We’ve proven that it has helped create instant time efficiencies across our customer support and internal teams. I can see so much value in building more investment into internal tools. We can utilise internal tools to undertake lightning fast prototyping across the business to test out ideas. We are already seeing this with our Finance and Inventory Tribes testing out our internal tools to build out prototypes for process improvements.
Some exciting aspects I want to try are connecting this internal tool with our internal APIs and also extending this to connect to various GraphQL services. This builds on our principles of PACE layered architecture.
Take Away
If you’re looking to reduce mundane tasks, want to help your teams become more efficient with time and people, I would strongly recommend investing effort in building internal tools. Small things like this have huge impacts to help scale and grow companies and teams.
What is AgriDigital?
AgriDigital is a global leading AgTech company helping power trust in global agriculture supply chains by connecting inventory, data and financial capital to empower our customers to grow their businesses.
We utilise the power of data across the AgriDigital ecosystem to build value added outcomes and services for anyone working with the agriculture sector and supply chain.
If you are interested in learning more about AgriDigital please visit our website at https://agridigital.io
Who am I?
I’m Shilpa, one of the engineers at AgriDigital. I work within the Enablement Tribe where we look for opportunities to help scale our teams to deliver outcomes for our customers. I’m learning everything and anything about infrastructure engineering in software.
