From Months to Days: Building Internal Tools at Colas

Colas, a subsidiary of the Bouygues Group, is a global leader in the construction and maintenance of transport infrastructures, committed to sustainable mobility solutions. Mobility by Colas merges traditional road-building expertise with digital advancements to enhance the daily transportation experience for users, goods, and commodities.

The company needed efficient internal tools to administer their services without developing a new interface for each project. The main challenge was synchronizing the development of these internal tools with the ongoing development of the main products. Initial internal development was feasible but inefficient, leading to the exploration of low-code platforms. The first application was created under tight constraints within 2-3 days, while more complex applications required up to 10 days, involving 20 pages and 60 actions.

We were looking for a platform to build applications to administrate our services, instead of developing for each project a new administration interface. That’s what led us to look at low-code platforms. One of the challenges with the creation of those applications is to synchronize with the development of the product for which we are creating the interface.

Mobility by Colas chose UI Bakery to expedite the creation of administration interfaces without extensive coding. The primary goal was to allow non-developers to quickly modify applications in a managed environment.

With UI Bakery, they developed three different applications to manage their products. The platform's drag-and-drop functionality and easy query management enabled rapid deployment of these apps. This approach significantly reduced the reliance on external development resources and streamlined the design process, allowing product owners to create and modify applications quickly.

Improved process: The adoption of UI Bakery transformed their internal app development process. Product owners, with minimal training, could design and deploy new applications efficiently, eliminating the need for extensive development resources. This efficiency allowed them to meet their goals of quick evolution and deployment.

Resource savings: UI Bakery facilitated substantial savings in both time and budget. For one project alone, the estimated time saving was approximately two months. The platform’s user-friendly interface, rapid deployment capabilities, and integrated version control via GIT were crucial in achieving these efficiencies.

Overall experience: The overall experience with UI Bakery has been highly positive. The platform is intuitive, and the support team is responsive and helpful. Key benefits include the speed of creating new interfaces, ease of component integration, and one-click deployment features. However, they identified areas for improvement, such as better integration with Azure Cloud storage and the ability to connect multiple external identities, which would enhance their use cases further.

The service is easy to apprehend. We are really satisfied with the product and the support team is always quick to answer questions. What we liked the most was the speed to have a new user interface connected to data, and all the components which are easy to integrate. Also, the deployment feature in one click and the version control with GIT.