How are new-age businesses adopting Low-code internal tools to navigate day-to-day business challenges?

The internal tool development strategy in 2021: Adopting Low-Code platforms. The success or failure of any digital transformation initiative depends not merely on the tools created but on the technique to create those tools that can deliver quantifiable results

Internal process optimization is no longer just a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have. Nearly every business today bands together various tools to help their business function properly and successfully. Teams need tools to help with workflow automation, data transformation for valuable insights, and become agile in a fast-paced ecosystem. New-age business leaders have been quick to understand the need for fast and cost-effective internal tools and by leveraging low-code and no-code platforms available to them taking away a lot of the legwork required to create digital tools and enabling agile teams to overcome some hard-hitting challenges that we discuss below.

The rise in Internal Tool Development

Internal tools fuel major growth for the business, as shared by Netflix, Facebook, Google, Github, Stripe, Buffer

Internal tools have been around for many years from a macro-laden spreadsheet to a custom-built tool. Today these tools are growing in popularity, especially after the likes of Netflix, Github, Google, Facebook, Stripe, Buffer, Airbnb sharing success stories on how internal tools fuel major growth for their businesses. The right tools in the hands of the business teams can enable them to extract the most value by simply reducing repeating manual tasks, speeding up complex data transformations, and increasing overall speed.

With this realization and the growing need for speed and automation, in the US alone, businesses are spending close to $300 billion per year on internal tools.

Prioritizing the use of existing resources

At this point it is important to address these internal tools need not be something built from scratch. Many product teams have shared that their goal is to create and bring to market a high-quality product with value in the shortest time possible by prioritizing the use of existing resources rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Simply put, new age organizations are leveraging ways to build internal tools on top of their existing databases and applications. So how are they doing it?

The growing Low-Code market; Work faster and more efficiently

You’ve probably heard this way too many times by now. What a developer needed over 30 days to create can now be created within thirty minutes with a low-code builder.

The worldwide low-code development technologies market is projected to total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.

By combining visual drag and drop UI development with business logic and a whole array of integrations to popular business tools and services, low-code platforms have enabled everyone to build internal tools needed at an incredibly fast pace. These tools not only reduce the line of code needed to build software, the ability to reuse components and connect to existing systems like Stripe, JIRA, Zendesk, or basically anything with an API in just a few clicks has accelerated the growth of these tools in the market.

Why do they prefer low-code internal tools as compared to the conventional mode of tool development?

1. Game-changing speed — Ready components and templates, reusability, ease of integration; with low-code it’s typically faster to create internal tools that would otherwise require dedicated IT resources and months worth of time. Research suggests a 50–90% decrease in development time compared to traditional applications.
2. Fun to use, prototype and innovate — Low-code apps can allow users to make changes so quickly it becomes cost-effective to experiment. Rapid iteration allows them to take risks and improve the tool through trial and error on a scale that would be much more expensive with traditional development. It also makes low-code solutions ideal for prototyping.
3. Lower development and running costs — The ability to integrate to other platforms in just a few clicks also saves a lot of headaches for the development teams. The built-in features that come packaged in the low-code platform, that become the backbone of the internal tools, are updated and maintained by the vendor.

Up and coming Unicorns need to modernize faster

Digital is in their DNA. New-age companies have a young workforce, less bureaucratic processes, more agility that gives them increased grasping power over new tools and technologies. Their openness to explore new technologies is very high. Here’s a look at the current climate for today’s unicorns.

The unicorns have either disrupted existing markets or created new ones. But today’s business climate calls on them to build for the long haul and be sustainable. As is evident, a lot of today’s high-value startups revolve around services like food delivery, taxis, and hotels. These have largely relied on easily accessible technologies like smartphones and cloud computing.

More recent studies however suggest that many of the up and coming that Forbes identified focus on highly specific services such as workplace solutions, flexible banking, supply chain management, and quality control & security. These up and coming unicorns have a larger responsibility on their heads to be modernized, remarks Kirsten Green, a venture capitalist at Forerunner Ventures as these are the industries that we need in our lives and in business in the coming future.

There is clear evidence that these businesses need to be at their A-games when it comes to digital solutions

Here is how new-age companies have adopted low-code for custom internal tools:

1. A budding manufacturing company created a custom inventory and order management dashboard taking the goods tracking process to the cloud. Starting right from backward integration to monitor purchase and sourcing to forward integrations with POS systems. Automatic entry of new goods, sales tracking from e-commerce websites, and integration with payment and delivery tracking systems offer a fast solution to managers for overall moderation. Digitalizing the order management offered them a unified view for all the teams, from the customer success to the accounting, warehouse staff, and the manager.
2. Well-integrated digital tools are essential to modern-day business, with most of the teams working remotely. A young internet company was quick to decide and build a digital attendance management tool, using which the workforce was able to punch in and punch out from any corner of the world. HR teams quickly built a GPS-integrated attendance system using low-code that provided good visibility of all data which also now integrates with their payrolls, leaves, and performance systems.
3. An online furniture store had an outbound quality inspection process carried out manually by the inspection team. To make their work easy and quick, they were ready to adopt, build, and experiment with low-code. They ended up building a Dynamic Inspection Checklist. For every product category, a customized checklist was built, which previously was maintained in Google Sheets. Digitizing the data capture from onsite inspections improved their efficiency seamlessly. The tool provided a tag and mapped it to the existing outbound processes, which undoubtedly made a difference in the quality and speed of their business processes. It also helped educate the users (inspection and audit team) on different inspection techniques for better quality checks.

How can low-code help SMEs business leap forward with digitisation

It’s impossible to achieve your business objectives without a full arsenal of enterprise applications to support internal functions. Company-based software and apps are becoming an indispensable part of the business. The demand for software application development is growing at an exponential rate. According to Gartner, the market demand for software application development will increase at least five times in 2021. And while the impact of having singular applications for business is growing, its cost is getting significantly reduced.

If we rewind just a few years — the digital transformation was expensive and unrealistic for small to medium-sized businesses. As larger and better-funded enterprises began to adopt emerging technology, SMEs discovered that they simply didn’t have the same amount of resources to deliver similar applications or even the urgency to build them, such as onboarding systems and invoicing tools. SMEs have greater capability to take risks, ideate, and innovate. By adopting low-code, SMEs that need to develop solutions themselves fast and flexibly can build, experiment, fail, learn from it, scale and take live digital tools at a much faster pace than the enterprise teams that have more stringent policies that restrict them from faster adoption.

Today, you don’t need employees with extensive programming language knowledge or months of training to create the software from scratch. That is the power of low-code.