Companies across the world are exploring low-code solutions that can help them become more agile and ready to adapt quickly as they undergo their digital transformation journeys. They want an infrastructure that can rapidly adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands.
These changes have largely coincided with the arrival of low-code and no-code development platforms in the market. Companies of all sizes are exploring these platforms to accelerate their business processes, and at least for building their internal processes and applications, most enterprises are preferring low-code or no-code development platforms.
Businesses are shifting from ready-to-deploy-but-less-agile BPM solutions to low-code or no-code BPM solutions within their workflows.
In this article, we explore what low-code BPM platforms are, how they work, and how businesses can choose the best low-code business process management solutions for their processes.
What is a low-code platform?
Low -code platforms or low-code development platforms are solutions that empower organizations and employees to build applications and workflow automation with little code. These platforms are designed to enable rapid application development and allow employees to collaborate easily with each other.
With low-code tools employees can create applications through a graphical interface with the help of pre-built UI components, integrations, and some coding. The coding part is usually for customizations beyond what you can do with the platform itself, but even in these cases, it could be just making some minor changes in the code available within the platform.
While these platforms offer a large number of customizations, themes, and UI components for users, if they want, users can build custom elements by coding them themselves. End-users can also tweak these pre-built components by lightly tweaking the code behind them.
Besides website development and email marketing, businesses use low-code tools to create business apps, integrations between their applications, and of course for business process management. They’re also commonly used to build dashboards, reports, and visualizations by connecting data sources to UI elements.
An important aspect of low-code is that most solutions take care of the backend architecture with almost no input from the user. These platforms manage the security, scalability, provisioning of the hardware, managing the cloud, and just about everything that happens behind the scenes.
What are some examples of low-code development platforms?
While it’s rarely (if ever) used for enterprise application development, WordPress is a good example of a low-code platform. Citizen developers with absolutely zero coding knowledge can build a decent website with pre-built UI components and a drag-and-drop interface. In a different use case, platforms like Mailchimp or SendGrid allow users to design email campaigns without any coding.
What are the benefits of low-code development platforms compared to traditional application development?
Here are five benefits of using low-code solutions for application development:
Low-code application development makes the organization agile
Low-code reduces application development costs
Low code development empowers employees to build solutions that work for them
Low-code allows organizations to leverage automation even in granular tasks
Low-code development improves productivity within the organization
Let’s get into these in detail:
1. Low-code makes the organization agile:
Traditional application development takes a lot of time and resources. Once a requirement is identified, it has to be defined correctly and communicated with the development team, who will initiate the development process. Once started, application development can take at least 3 months, depending on the available resources.
If the market conditions or business requirements change, the process has to start, more or less from the beginning. Because of this, organizations had to prioritize changes and carefully plan them.
Low-code application development significantly cuts down time to launch. Even if they wanted to make changes after the app is built, it’s fairly straightforward. This allows businesses to rapidly change and adapt to environments.
2. Low-code reduces application development costs
Traditional development requires skilled professional developers which either means outsourcing the project at a higher cost or building an internal team with serious overheads. Businesses also have to make significant investments to build the infrastructure to support the application.
Once built, the company has to invest resources to maintain and update the application regularly. The development team has to be on top of security vulnerabilities and roll out patches quickly.
With low-code app development platforms, employees can make applications on their own with little experience. Businesses also don’t have to worry about maintaining the application or about security vulnerabilities. In some cases, low-code platforms will even manage compliance and governance aspects as well.
3. Low code development tools empowers business users to build solutions that work for them
In the traditional development approach, when employees need an internal application, they have to raise a request with the IT team. Even with the best development methodologies, this can result in communication gaps and the resulting app may not be exactly what the team needed.
Low-code platforms enable employees who intimately understand their own needs and requirements to develop solutions that best work for them. In some ways, low-code decentralizes application development within a company.
4. Low-code development allows organizations to leverage automation even in granular business processes
Business process automation can help employees to focus on the larger picture instead of spending their time on repetitive activities. It helps the organization focus its energy on its core activities. But building automation solutions takes considerable resources. While many vendors offer automation solutions or implement automation within their products, they may not offer the flexibility the organization needs.
Organizations often end up prioritizing use cases where they need automation.
Low-code makes automation more accessible for businesses.
5. Low-code improves productivity within the organization
Low-code reduces the waiting-around time for employees to implement their ideas. If an employee can see an opportunity to improve revenue or processes or reduce wastage, they can just get to it without waiting for the development team.
How does a low-code business process management platform or a low-code BPM work?
Effective business process management is essential for a smooth digital transformation. Companies need the capability to analyze, model, improve, and optimize their business processes. There are many vendors that offer BPM software, and while they’re very much capable, there are limits on how much you can customize them.
A low-code BPM platform take this to the next level with advanced customizations and more flexible automation. They allow citizen developers with little to no coding skills to create custom workflow automation, business apps, and process monitoring dashboards, model, map out, and optimize business processes.
Traditional BPM software solutions are often modeled around various management methodologies. Of course, this doesn’t mean they’re not flexible. But organizations often find it limiting to stick to just one methodology or process management approach.
To look at the problem from another perspective, different departments may have their unique approaches to workflows; what works for the finance department may not work for the HR department. Over the years, these departments have developed frameworks that work well for their use cases. So a one-size-fits-all approach may be costly in the long run.
These different use cases can also result in different teams and departments using their own BPM solutions reducing visibility within the organization and creating data silos.
Another aspect is that these BPM solutions don’t allow businesses to rapidly or iteratively modify their operating processes. As market conditions and business environments change and new methodologies come up, businesses may find themselves not able to adapt and may require a complete change of their digital infrastructure.
With a low-code business process management solution, companies and teams can create business apps that works for them. They can build solutions that work around their requirements and needs. Individual departments will also have the freedom to create unique workflows with low-code.
Why should businesses invest in a low-code BPM platform?
The low-code approach confers many benefits over a traditional BPM solution. They allow companies to rapidly prototype and launch, test, iterate and optimize their workflows.
By investing in a low-code BPM platform, businesses can improve their processes and improve their profits in the long run. These solutions offer companies the opportunity to create tailor-made workflows, automation, and processes without making huge investments in training or building a developer team.
Even if you have development teams in your organization, you can still use a low-code solution to reduce the workload for them. By enabling employees to develop applications for themselves, the IT team can focus on the larger problems or complicated solutions the low-code platform cannot handle.
Low-code vs BPM
There is some debate as to whether businesses should opt for a low-code platform instead of a traditional BPM. The reasoning is that businesses can do more with a low-code platform and use it for BPM instead of getting a single business process management system. But at the same time, a BPM system would have more features dedicated to process management than a general low-code platform.
Most modern businesses tend to go for the low-code approach
There may be a justified tendency for companies to go for low-code platforms since they require much less expertise from the user. BPM solutions often require extensive training for users to get the maximum value out of them. Customizing them takes serious resources, as we discussed earlier.
But with a low-code BPM platform, businesses don’t have to compromise between the two. These solutions let business users customize them easily, but at the same time, they’re designed for BPM and therefore most of the work may already be done.
How to choose a low-code BPM platform for your business:
Here are five things you should look for while choosing a low-code BPM platform for your business.
Hosting options suitable for your business use case
Good UI
Strong set of integrations
Check customer ratings and case studies
Great customer support
Let’s have a look at why these factors are important:
Hosting options suitable for your business use case
Many low-code BPM platforms offer a SaaS approach where the platform will be hosted on the vendor’s cloud. A SaaS low-code solution will work for the majority of the users, but it’s important to check if it is suitable for yours.
Companies in highly regulated sectors with strict data governance laws may want a hybrid or a self-hosted solution. If that’s the case, look for low-code solutions that let you host it in your hardware.
Good UI/UX
The success of a low-code BPM platform is largely determined by how much employees have adopted it into their workflows. If the platform is not easy to use, if it’s not easy for business users to understand, it may be abandoned or not put to its full capabilities.
Before deciding on a low-code platform, check its UI and see how user-friendly it is.
A strong set of integrations
You want your BPM solution to work with the rest of your digital workplace solutions as seamlessly as possible. Business process management platforms work best when you can view and work on the data from multiple systems and solutions that a company uses.
When choosing a low-code solution, ensure that it offers a strong set of integrations with other platforms and systems.
Good customer ratings and case studies
It’s not easy to get customer reviews on B2B solutions. And simple one-line reviews won’t show the full picture. Check for case studies, see how the platform was implemented, and what the results were.
Great customer support
You need a BPM solution that offers excellent customer support. A low-code BPM platform will be a core part of your business processes and if it glitches, you will need to get it resolved as soon as possible.
Ensure that the vendor offers excellent support to implement it and can help you get going quickly in case you run into trouble.
Ready to join the low-code BPM revolution? Try Cadynce
Cadynce is a low-code or no-code BPM platform with state-of-the-art business process automation capabilities. The platform is designed to help business users to automate their workflows and processes with little to no training and take their productivity to the next level.
The platform has a simple and intuitive UI, supports an amazing set of integrations, and has already created brilliant results for some of our customers. Our team is dedicated to getting your business streamlined and efficient and we’ll be right beside you as you take this journey to digital transformation.
Ready to get started? Sign up now…
