#28 Low Code vs Traditional App Development Part 2

Yeah, and it's not necessarily— so obviously cost is always a factor everyone looks at, but I think key is, as you mentioned, to look at the right things and make sure that the pipeline is full for this kind of initiatives. Initiatives. This is where we, for example, bring in process mining, isn't it, to find out in what areas of the business is the potential. Very often, if you ask each department, everyone comes up with an idea or several ideas because they know where the pain is on a daily basis. They know they're doing stupid copy and paste like 4 hours a week. So if you multiply this with several departments, several regions and entities, that kind of stuff adds up very quickly. And we probably shouldn't talk about pricing too much. Sure, you have to look at it, but very often the value outweighs that anyway. So, but initially I guess you have to look at, do your math and calculate all that stuff. Yeah, and it is very useful to find the really high impact opportunities and to build up this pipeline either for this low-code app development candidates or even software robotics as RPA candidates. Yeah, there are so many, so many areas. Costs is obviously one thing, but you can also look at it, how much more could the business perform, could the business do without looking at the cost of staff? You could look at it as if we put this in place and get this problem solved and all these problems solved, How much more capacity do we have for more? Can we do 10 times more output potentially by doing good end-to-end automation? Are we one of the businesses who achieve 80% end-to-end automation? If you look at it, most businesses, there's huge potential, but you need the visibility, and process mining is one aspect, I guess. More and more companies are looking at. Yeah, definitely something to analyze during a discovery phase and when setting up your sort of potentially your center of excellences. So this is all what they are doing day in, day out generally to find good candidates and opportunities within the business. Yeah. And then yeah, we shouldn't talk about too much about this cost, I guess, because value usually it should, should outweigh 10x, 20x.

Yeah, but I think, you know, for me it's, uh, we always talk about innovation within site business, and, you know, innovation means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I think innovation could be something very small like automating a very simple manual process. Now, for one person, that possibly is not too innovative, but for another person that has to deal with a lot of manual processes where emails get fired at them and they have to deal with a lot of emails with inside their inbox and put emails in different folders, that's quite innovative. If, if there's an opportunity for them to to automate a process where, you know, invoices arrives, they create a small little process that can, you know, take those invoices, attach it to a case or to a workflow, route that for approval. And then all of a sudden, you know, you've got a business process that's automated, that you can have some interesting metrics, you know what everything is. And that's innovative, right? And a scenario like that doesn't take long to implement in low-code. And it doesn't take a technical person, for example, to be able to automate that. That is something quite straightforward with these low-code products. If you take that a step further and you say, well, with inside this process, I have got double keying in information from the invoice to the finance system. Or maybe that's the part that there's a, a gap for a robot to be plugged in. You know, we've dealt with this approval business. Now we can actually, for this particular task where the, the invoice gets captured in our finance system, train a robot to do that, plug that into your process. Now all of a sudden you've got, um, you know, a process that's tenfold better because you can scale now. No matter how many invoices come in, you could quickly manage them. You could send them for approval and you've got a robot that does the keying in into your backend system. And again, that's innovative. It's only a small example. To scale that across the business, there could be a lot of these innovative ideas that really makes a big difference, the sum of all of it. And I think that's the key. Key of these, these, these low-code platforms, not to, you know, take these great ideas, throw them at IT. IT is busy and it sort of just goes into the realms of a backlog somewhere and it takes long to implement it. You know, we want to expedite that innovation and provide people the tools to actually go and innovate themselves. And when they actually arrive at these innovative, let's say, lighter touchpoint solutions that solve problems for them, if that then needs to go to IT because it's becoming something that becomes key to a business, at least you've got something functional, at least you've got something that's already saving time. All you then need to do is have that discussion with IT and say, we want this as a managed sort of application now, because we can't afford for this thing to be down. Can you guys help us? We've used very standard low-code platforms. We haven't done something out of the ordinary here. This is not something that is totally crazy. It is just using normal technology that's, you know, from vendors that is quite transparent. It's easily manageable, easily supportable. Take that into your support kind of, I guess, process and make sure it runs and continue on that track, you know, allow people to innovate with inside the business.

Absolutely, yeah, and I think only that approach will allow or will make sure they are not just coming up with some weird solutions, isn't it? So that would be the downside if you're very strict as IT. They still have the problem to solve. IT is not solving it. At some point, everyone becomes very inventive. And this, I think being inventive means, or in the past it always meant, you get this shadow IT. We talked about this earlier. So people had servers under their desk running sort of business-critical stuff, and then that a person moves on into another position or so, and no one knows that there's a server, and then suddenly these IT requests coming in, and IT just freaks out and say, what is this? We have a business-critical application here somewhere on the server. And if they come up with this, with sort of like a good partnership, a bit of a governance, a few set of rules, and otherwise, yeah, here's a good platform, you can do stuff here, it's nicely in boundaries and then everyone, everyone really, yeah, can, can start and it's nothing new.

I think there's nothing new here. I think that the boundaries of opportunity has just shifted quite a lot. You know, if we look at, for instance, at the Microsoft Power Automate platform, that provides eat as much as you want automation to a variety of business users. And it's within sight, the governance of what the Power Automate platform provides you. So it's very easy for me to create a Microsoft Flow. When an email arrives, I could look at that email, look at the contents of the email, and kick off a flow that does specific things. So what we're talking about here in terms of governance and creating these apps, it's nothing new. It is already there. I think the point here is that it's just sort of raising that awareness that these platforms exist. People could use these platforms to self-diagnose and implement problems and do so very quickly. And, you know, it doesn't have to be very sort of elaborate type solution, enterprise-grade things. It is problems that solves issues with inside your department, for example. And, you know, most of the low-code platforms, if not all, provides those governance around security, data protection, you know, release management, scalability. So that's all assumed. So all it provides you is this ability to create these applications very quickly, and it opens that up to the masses, right? And I think sometimes that's kind of a bit overlooked, where we look at a problem. On the surface, it looks like we need to engage a development team, but that's not always the case, right? Let's say, for example, a simple supplier onboarding. Well, the supplier onboarding is a form. You fill it out. It goes for review, credit checking. It might then send a questionnaire back to the supplier to attach some documentation as to their compliancy, maybe some insurance they've got, liability insurance. It goes back to a team. Once it's done, it gets persisted in a back office system. Now all of that is possible in a low-code world. By using a citizen developer, because all you're really doing is you're creating a digital form, you're stringing together a workflow, you're creating a DocuSign integration perhaps for your electronic signature, and you've got a bit of RPA that integrates with the back office system. And if you have quite a large volume of suppliers that you onboard, a simple solution like this compared to, let's say, an Excel-based solution where Supplier onboardings go to a centralized inbox. Somebody logs it in Excel spreadsheets so they can keep track of it. It's 100-fold better because A, it's centralized, B, it's not dark data somewhere in Excel where somebody needs to know how to update stuff. And that's the sort of thing that we're talking about here.

Yeah, tremendous opportunities for every business to really look at. And yeah, we say it in plenty of our episodes, If you're on this journey already or started the journey or are very interested to start the journey, Arno and I are here for you. So if you have any questions on the low-code topic and any other automation topics, visit our website theautomationguys.net. There you can just connect with us or find us on all the social channels. Yeah, we have all the partnerships, so we are very broad in partnerships. We're not focused on just one level of technology. So if you need sort of some advice on what is the right approach, what is the right technology, the right vendor for that, I think we, yeah, we have lots of experience and happy to advise there. And we can get you as a partner, get you started on some really good trial packages you probably wouldn't get otherwise. So yeah, reach out to us and we can set you up there with trials and get you started on that journey. Um, Arne, anything, anything you'd like to add?

Um, um, no, and I think like I can just echo what Sasha said, um, you know, reach out to us. I think that, um, you know, part of what we do is, is to look at problems and to size it up and to understand if you come to us with a problem, we can very quickly provide you an estimate how that would potentially look like in, in low-code. And I can guarantee you, compared to conventional development, that number will be far lower than conventional development. And of course, the implementation time frames will be far less than conventional development as well. So, you know, I would invite our listeners to and almost challenge them to bring these problems to us, these business problems they have. And, you know, we could look at that and really explore what that would take to implement with inside a low-code platform, just to give you that different perspective and that different view of, you know, what automation, you know, can cost for your business, but also what value it brings and how quickly you could do that. And also, you know, just to sort of contrast that against your, conventional approaches. You know, we, we, we are obviously work very closely with, with, with customers that, that brings us these problems every day. So it's second nature for us to, to provide these estimates, and we know that's important to, to bring these estimates into business cases. You know, so it is a place where we can help if, if, if you're looking at your next automation project and, and the costings around it and sort of the benefits it provide your business. You know, we can help with all of that.

Great. Yeah, thank you very much, Arno. Yeah, another, another session on low-code. So we have plenty of episodes on our podcast. If you're not a regular follower or subscriber yet, yeah, I recommend you subscribe to this podcast. Lots of really good stuff coming out every week. And yeah, and that will be it for today. And yeah, thank you very much for listening. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it! [MUSIC] [MUSIC]