6 digital transformation benefits you can achieve with low-code

In 2021, after the pandemic outbreak, quarantine, social distancing limitations, a lot of businesses worldwide shifted their entire business vision. They had to admit the importance of performing digital transformation to sustain their market share during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic world.

Continuously growing customer expectations force businesses of all sizes to find new ways to respond to the market changes more readily than their competitors. Being more responsive and agile has become a must in today’s do-or-die digital transformation movement.

The software industry has also greatly changed. The introduction of new software into the mainstream has sped up. Waiting months or even years for the next software version release is not acceptable anymore since there’s an approach allowing you to avoid it. Today, new features are released in days or weeks in modern agile systems for software development. And this is possible due to the use of low-code platforms, and due to the low-code digital transformation.

Why low-code?

According to Gartner, a low-code app development platform is aimed at providing “rapid application development using low-code and no-code techniques such as declarative, model-driven application design and development together with the simplified one-button deployment of applications”.

Low-code development platforms allow you to build mobile apps, web apps, internal tools, websites to conduct digital transformation 10 times faster than with traditional manual coding. Among the benefits of low-code development is no need to know programming languages to create a functional application on your own. Moreover, you don’t have to keep up with the endless updates in technology stacks. You can use a drag-and-drop interface of a low-code platform to create data connections, relationships, workflows. You can build dashboards, add the needed UI components and widgets, eventually publish your app, and start inviting users.

In terms of digital transformation, low-code development tools are one of the most versatile options on the market. They offer templates, predefined widgets, built-in UI components, data connectors, API integration options to those who don’t have any mature coding skills. You can connect your UI to almost any third-party app or service: HubSpot, Salesforce, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Stripe, Twilio, etc. If you need to add some complex functionality to your app, you can add custom code (e.g., JavaScript) and create custom reusable UI components and business logic.

What options to consider when starting digital transformation

Not long ago, you had only 2 options to choose from when going digital: hiring a third-party vendor and laying the responsibility for implementing digital transformation on your own IT department’s shoulders. 

Both approaches have big disadvantages. Third-party vendors are often too expensive, especially for small businesses, while in-house IT departments are usually too busy with their core responsibilities like supporting routine updates, configuring existing systems, etc.

Thanks to the occurrence of low-code platforms, there’s the third option: get a cost-effective, flexible, scalable, and fully customizable solution that can be perfectly tailored to your user requirements. Due to the benefits of low-code software, it takes days instead of months of custom app development.

Low-code platforms provide templates of existing device configurations that could be updated with new parameters when needed and automatically pushed out. There's no necessity to configure anything manually. Thanks to the automation option a low-code approach offers, you can save time and effort while increasing your systems’ reliability.

Low-code benefits in digital transformation

Let's briefly cover the main benefits of low-code digital transformation.

#1. Increase productivity

One of the main low-code digital transformation key benefits is that you can enable business users to build applications or internal tools on their own. Thus, the innovation process becomes more agile. Business users are able to quickly implement new solutions to improve their work performance without any help from software engineers. Also, if you decide to add custom code to your app, low-code platforms give warnings if there are any errors, and offer suggestions on how to correct them. Thus, your development team spends much less time on fixing problems, and the overall time needed to create a digital transformation solution is cut.

#2. Improve collaboration

The easy-to-use interfaces of low-code platforms allow business users, IT departments, investors, and stakeholders to create web and mobile applications optimized for team collaboration. The administration rights ensuring the visibility over your system will still be retained by IT. However, they won’t need to create every app themselves now. Instead, the development can be passed on to so called “citizen developers”.

#3. Decrease time-to-market

The low-code approach accelerates the app development cycle for both IT professionals and business users due to the prebuilt functionality low-code platforms have. Ready-made app templates and dashboards, predefined UI components, an ability to create your own components and use them across your project, in-built connectors, API integration functionality, and more. The time spent on app design and development is decreased. The delivery of a new app takes days or weeks instead of months. You can further add and release iterations in a few clicks of a button on the go. Due to the decreased time-to-market and other benefits of low-code development, you can achieve a higher return on platform investment.

#4. Enhance customer experience

According to Forbes, 84% of companies who make customer experience a priority achieve a significant increase in revenue. One of the key goals of digital transformation is to improve your customers’ journey with your brand, and decrease the time a new lead needs to convert into a loyal client. With low-code, you can build, roll out, scale your mobile and web apps to keep up with the growing user requirements. Moreover, to ensure better customer experience, a range of low-code platforms allow for building mobile and web apps with responsive design automatically optimized for smaller screen sizes. Your IT department doesn’t have to spend time on that.

#5. Optimize data utilization & accessibility

With the digital transformation conducted using low-code, you can collect all the needed data faster in one place, and further analyse it to create value. Low-code platforms can also be leveraged to develop dashboards allowing the users with different access levels see the exact data relevant to their needs. Thus, you greatly reduce the probability of accidental data losses.

What’s more, low-code platforms allow you to integrate your legacy systems, out-of-the-box solutions, third-party services and business apps with the web app or internal tool you’re building. Due to this, you can improve and standardize all your data ensuring its consistency and security throughout the company.

#6. Achieve cost-efficiency

Compared to the use of out-of-the-box solutions or custom app development, low-code platforms allow you to save on the app development costs. You don’t need to hire skilled professionals for app development. Almost any business user with only basic understanding of how everything works and with no mature frontend development skills can scale your app as your user requirements and needs expand.

What you can build with low-code to go digital

There’s a variety of low-code platforms (Retool, UI Bakery, Internal, and many more) offering solutions for internal tool building, visual modeling, business process management, application lifecycle management including app deployment and updates.

With low-code development tools available on the market today, you can build: 

• Internal tools to achieve more efficient task management, customer relationship management, inventory management, sales management, etc.
• Business apps to speed up and simplify accounting and financial operations.
• Customer engagement and customer support apps to facilitate customer service management.
• Logistics apps or dashboards to drive logistics operations management.
• Data visualization tools to provide your business users and stakeholders with a convenient representation of the data they need.

Digitize your business with low-code faster & with less effort

Nowadays, even the “big cloud players” have offerings in the low-code development space. Microsoft have been working on their PowerApps for several years already, Google Cloud works on AppSheet, AWS released Honeycode in 2020. The other low-code platforms like Retool, Internal.io, UI Bakery are available and are constantly improving their functionality and offerings.

Modern low-code platforms offer free onboarding sessions and trainings, ready-made application infrastructure, better usability with intuitive user interfaces, data connection & API integration, one-click app deployment, self-hosted options, and more.

Whether you’ve just started digitizing your business, or you’re nearing the halfway point of the trip, consider how low-code platforms can aid in your digital transformation process. Investigate the most suitable low-code tools to figure out how they work, what features they have, and what security level you can ensure thanks to them. Build a sample project. This will not require a lot of investments from you while your return can be really high.

‍If you need any help in making a decision, contact our team. We’ll show you around one of the most powerful and fastest low-code internal tools builders – UI Bakery. Share your case details with us, and we’ll help you build the first version of your application.