#99 Low Code and No Code in 2024 - Part 2

Just looking at education, for example, as well, you know, even something as I would say different than the sort of mainstream finance apps that we always talk about with automation, you know, you look at educational platforms where you can create e-learning solutions, for example, and course management systems and, you know, tools for, you know, for an interactive learning experience, you know, integration with Teams, for example, online sort of exams. So that's a very, very good example as well of a sort of a bit of a left-field use case that people don't always associate with these types of tools. I think, again, the takeaway here is that most of the sort of systems that, or problems in the various sort of domains that you could, you could find, you know, including education, finance, you know, legal, even departmental problems, HR, you know, all of these things. There is a sort of a platform or application you need. You can actually use no-code and low-code platforms to build something, you know, community platform, for example, where you can build an online community discussion forums. You know, you can even build a social networking application, you know, so all of those, if you take that and you've got the ability to sort of tailor it as well. So perhaps if you use a low-code platform, there's specific things that you want to tailor, you want to integrate with other tools, you know, that's a good example as well. And then even things like the Internet of Things applications where perhaps you've got field devices out there that's got sensory data that needs to be sent back. And, you know, you need to have that telemetry somewhere on a dashboard. You know, low-code platforms actually, you know, supports integration with various sort of standards, you know, out there to technology standards, data integration. So even if you have got sort of hardware related data, that sensory data that needs to be sort of observed in a, let's say, control room. You could use these platform capabilities, these platforms as well to create these dashboards and to create alerts, create workflows if certain things go out of the threshold. So it is sometimes very hard not to find an example of what you do.

Yes.

You know, I sometimes look at problems, you know, especially when prospective customers come to us and they say, you know, have you ever solved this problem before? And you look at the problem and instantly you think, well, it's not necessarily a problem that we've seen because it's bespoke to that person's sort of requirement, but it's definitely something that we know. There is a process in there, there's a user interface in there that we need to assign tasks to people in order to do the process. There's a reporting element in there that people want to know where things are and how long it takes to do things and a KPI dashboard. You know, there's an integration element in there that perhaps needs to communicate to a different system to pull data through. There might be a robotic process automation robot in there that actually goes scrape a backend system because there's no integration. So it's so diverse. You know, we're talking about appointment booking systems as well, from that to claims management systems, you know, underwriting processes. So it is a— I think if it is usually, you know, the rule of thumb is if somebody requests something or sends something to you that needs to go through a process and it needs to be some sort of outcome, you know, you have to tell yourself, well, that is something that this software can do 10 times quicker than, you know, going to a sort of a development company or to a, you know, a bunch of developers to say, can you, can you develop this for me? So it's not just the time to market to actually create it, but it's also the momentum. So when you see a problem and you implement it in low-code, you usually see the solution very quickly. So you could change your mind. You could change your mind quite quickly to say, oh, that's not what I meant. I meant it should be like this. So you almost use it a bit like a prototype as well to get where you should be. But obviously at a drastically reduced sort of cost because, you know, it's quick to get there. If something doesn't work, you could just change configuration, try it again. Of course, when you've got conventional coding, then, you know, throwing away hours and hours of technical code that a developer has done because somebody misunderstood the requirement or the requirement wasn't very, very clear. So in a way, that developer sort of created a prototype, but a very, very expensive one.

Yeah, yeah, especially low-code to no-code. So we very often compare that sort of to Lego, isn't it? So you have, you have that set of Lego bricks in your box and then you can just already ready for you to use. So no, a proper coder very often starts, there's lines of codes and then until you see something it takes a bit longer. And now with these ready-made Lego bricks you can just put pretty much everything together. Sure, you're restricted to what the Lego bricks can do, but Yeah, but, but, uh, yeah, you, you get to some results so much quicker, even if that is needed just for prototyping or so.

But, um, uh, yeah, I, I think with a set of LEGO, you could probably build any type of shape. Now, it's going to not be 100% as to the absolute shape you need, but generally speaking, you know, if those components are small enough, you can assemble it in such a way that you feel this is good enough. And I think that's the point here, right? It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect because there, there are gonna be some areas where you say, well, wouldn't it be nice if it could do this? Well, then you have to say, well, at what cost? Time or financial cost. And if it's a compliance issue, for example, then of course you're gonna implement, you know, or perhaps if, you know, if people's lives depend on it. So, so, so, so those are different sort of arguments you could, you could throw at this and say, well, sometimes you have to be thorough, but other times, you know, asking a user to actually use a report that doesn't look 100% pixel perfect than what they expect it to be, or when they showed you the Excel, I think that that's allowable because if it's quick to get to that point, use the remaining time to solve another problem. Another thing that you get for free as well is things like security.

Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. So you don't have to code security frameworks and security components. It's already in there. It's scalable. It's cloud.

Yeah. And very often as well, that was that secure. It's because it sits on a cloud platform or so, which is already fully hosted. You don't even have to worry about the IT to supply you servers, etc. So it's already there. So it's secure. Ready available in all sorts of different versions. So dev environment, test environment, production environment. Okay, that gets very, very far, but yeah, but it's something to, yeah, it's a huge benefit and that's very often included in sort of the license fees. Yeah, so something to use. And the same as was AI you talked about, so it doesn't need to be 100%. The same now, With AI, you think, ah, okay, can we rely 100% on AI? But you, you don't have to because you just look at the process, the certain process steps, where can it help to a certain stage and take that sort of effort of trawling through documents and preparing content, et cetera. So if, if, if you can have AI helping you 60, 70, 80%, uh, beforehand, and then you jump in as a, as a human, uh, into the process, uh, it will be huge time saver. It doesn't need to be 100%, but it can take a lot of effort away, so you're more productive. So that applies for AI and automation as a whole. Yeah, the use cases, as you have noticed, they're very, very vast. And these applications and platforms, low-code and no-code platforms, this is This is the crazy thing. So when we looked at those platforms 3, 4 years ago, we were already impressed what these platforms can do. But nowadays these platforms, they get better on a daily basis, nearly. So yeah, it's incredible. And if you now think that after all these use cases we went through, you think, ah, no, that's not for me, that's not for my industry. So let's cover a few industries. Industries, and then you see if your niche or your business is not covered or cannot benefit from low-code or no-code. So maybe I jump in straight away, and then, Arno, you can maybe take over a few others. So finance and banking, yeah. So these low-code and no-code solutions help, of course, streamline the process, and specifically maybe customer onboarding, credit approvals, and yeah, with more power of AI, even those low-code and no-code solutions can help you to detect fraud within the company and make everything more safe and compliant. So very powerful. The next one, we touched briefly on it earlier, healthcare. Healthcare providers can use low-code and no-code to develop patient management systems. We talked about bookings and appointments. So yeah, these apps as well. And of course can look at the data in a much better way than they were able to do it before, or they had to bring in data analysts and programmers in. So nowadays, yeah, they can do this stuff with low-code and no-code much easier.

Yeah, and again, retail, for example. So retail is also one that's sometimes a bit overlooked. But again, things I've mentioned earlier for Retail, you can do low-code applications for inventory management, e-commerce platforms that include sort of integrated payment capabilities, customer relationship management applications. That's all linked to that. If you look at manufacturing, for example, low-code aids in process automation, quality control, things like supply chain management, manufacturing sector. I touched on education. So again, you know, student information systems, course management e-learning platforms, government, obviously government agencies could utilize low-code for citizen services.

Oh yeah, that's a big one.

Yeah. Yeah. Permit applications. And of course they can all use that underlying data to do really good data analysis, you know, to understand, you know, people's behaviors, you know, when, when, you know, to set up alerts to preempt or pre-warn people when certain permits is gonna expire. Very powerful types of additional sort of alerts that you can build into these systems.

Yeah, next one. So of course there are more industries to come here. So real estate, real estate companies could create property management software, listing directories, and CRM systems, building these with low-code and no-code. Insurance, similar like financial services and banking. It helps with onboarding, customer portals, policy management, claims processing, a very, very big one. Yeah, and everything available, intelligent document processing. So now low-code, no-code with the power of AI. Yeah, transportation and logistics. The platforms, low-code platforms and no-code platforms could assist with in-route optimizations, tracking of the fleet, the whole fleet management. Fleet, documents, everything what's available in these kind of companies could benefit from it.

Yeah, and obviously we look at nonprofit organizations, charities, for example, where they can manage sort of all of their donors. Event planning is a big one, planning of fundraising events. Basically sort of managing, you know, sort of the people that work for them, you know, volunteers. So again, you know, very, very vast application just with inside that industry as well. You look at energy and utilities, look at things like applications that can assist in energy consumption and tracking equipment maintenance. For example, we talked about IoT, the ability for, equipment to actually broadcast telemetry to a low-code platform, low-code platform to actually have rules inside it to actually raise alerts and change colors on dashboards. You know, think about things like utility management as well. If we look at sort of the legal firms, case management, legal case management systems that could be built using low-code platforms, We look at sort of document automation tools, things like contract management. So again, legal services with a lot of the low-code platforms, it actually has got legal case frameworks inside the box. It's very easy to get started with, you know, sort of the baseline frameworks that you don't require for all of your sort of legal services sort of automation needs. And then of course, things like hospitality where you think about reservation systems, customer feedback apps, event booking platforms, you know, and again, sort of from that inside the entertainment sector, ticketing systems, you know, content delivery platforms, fan engagement applications. So again, I think these just sort of scratches some of those, those highlights with inside these industries. And it tends to be sort of the customer-facing side. Of course, all of these industries also got back-office processes, HR processes, and I guess those will be the standard ones that's not necessarily industry-specific. So don't just see these examples just as what you can do with inside the industry. These examples that we're using, of course, in the back office, you know, you could automate your accounts payable, accounts receivable process for an entertainment company, for a hospitality company, for a legal firm, for example.

Yeah, plenty of horizontal solutions. Yeah.

Yeah.

HR, for example, will be probably across the board, slightly variations, but pretty much every industry has that. The topic of HR and finance, probably very similar.

Yes.

Yeah, to round up that list here, we have 3 more. So that's the agriculture industry. So farmers and agriculture business could use low-code and no-code solutions for crop monitoring. We talked about IoT devices earlier, so it was like cameras and AI. You could follow what's going on with the crop equipment maintenance. And of course, data analysis, very important. Pharmaceuticals, lots of compliance in pharma. So you could use the low-code and no-code technology to build the applications around that clinical trial management and drug development. It's a very, very regulated industry. So then they use it a lot already. So the last one is construction. Yeah, construction can use low-code and no-code for building project management, subcontractor management. Equipment tracking, and of course, again, compliance. So you see there's pretty much a use case for everyone in every industry. Yeah, so that means you all can start with automation, process automation, AI automation, workflow applications today and benefiting from all the available tools. Yeah, tools, as I mentioned earlier, they're getting better on a daily basis. Plenty of those are now enhanced with AI. So that wasn't the case a couple of years ago, but since AI and ChatGPT and that was very popular, everyone on the low-code, in the low-code and no-code market obviously throws that in and you can benefit from that without being an AI developer or data analyst and machine learning expert. So yeah, and encourage everyone to get started. So if you haven't listened to the previous episodes of the Process and Automation Podcast, yeah, we talk a lot about everything process and automation. So plenty of content there, nearly 100 episodes of me and Arno talking about all things process and automation. If you like to learn more, join the community on theautomationguys.net or tune in next week or so for another episode. And until then, let's automate it.