How Low-Code Platforms Solve Complex Business Challenges

Low-code platforms are gaining popularity, which is proven by statistics. Now they are used by almost 80% of organizations. But why do so many businesses choose low-code development tools for their projects? The reasons are hidden in the optimal combination of the benefits that such platforms offer and the resources that they require. They allow companies to build efficient solutions for addressing complex business tasks with minimal effort and time investments. Isn’t it exactly what any organization needs?

In this article, we are going to talk about the challenges that low-code tools help to solve and mention some examples of their practical use.

Low-code platforms: What can they offer?

Let’s start with a very quick overview of the low-code automation software and its typical features.

Such platforms allow their users to build powerful business applications and successfully automate multiple processes with zero or minimal coding.  

Here’s what low-code development tools can provide:

• Visual development. App creation is executed with the help of drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built components.
• Customization. Low-code platforms usually enable users to customize available components and templates. This ensures the desired flexibility.
• Collaboration features. They are often enriched with role-based access and version control for team development, as well as tools for collaboration between IT and business teams.
• Security. All reliable platforms of this type are equipped with compliance features and powerful data security mechanisms like encryption.
• Low entry barrier. Quite often even non-technical users can work with low-code platforms after minimal training.

You can read more about low-code services and the available features on our blog by following this link.

Use of low-code development tools in addressing top 5 business challenges

With their rich functionality and flexibility, low-code tools can be helpful in dealing with all the most common challenges that businesses have today.

Challenge 1. Slow software development cycles

Teams that rely only on traditional development methods may need months or years to deliver applications. This can cause serious delays in the launch of critical business solutions. Moreover, it’s important to bear in mind that the business world is pretty dynamic, while the competition in many markets is too high. Due to the late release of solutions, businesses may simply lose their market share if their competitors are faster.

Solution: Low-code platforms enable rapid application development. It is possible thanks to pre-built templates, drag-and-drop interfaces, and visual workflows. As a result, development time can be reduced from months to days or weeks.

For example, our low-code experts needed just 1 month to build a UI Bakery PDF editor app. The client wanted to launch a solution for designing and printing personalized badges based on the available templates.

The delivered application pulls data from Snowflake, merges data, designs badges, and helps to automate the verification and print processes. Without relying on the low-code platform, the development team would have needed much more time to create a solution with similar functionality.

Challenge 2. High development costs

It can be rather expensive to hire and further retain skilled developers. Given the rates that professional programmers with specific expertise may have, custom development projects often exceed budgets. Moreover, every update or modernization initiative may become a serious investment.

Solution: Low-code tools help to cut off development costs. First of all, it is possible thanks to reducing development time. Secondly, such platforms greatly democratize software development. They enable even business users without tech backgrounds (so-called citizen developers) to build and modernize apps. It means that businesses can reduce their reliance on large development teams.

Challenge 3. Process inefficiency

Manual processes and separate workflows are common pain points in organizations. For example, such repetitive tasks as data entry, approvals, or status updates can consume a lot of valuable employee time. What’s more, manual processes are typically prone to errors. Due to a human factor, it is possible to miss steps in workflow or fail to meet deadlines.

Solution: Intelligent business process automation is one of the low-code examples. Such platforms can help organizations successfully optimize their workflows and minimize manual intervention.

Quite often companies rely on low-code solutions to automate such processes as:

• employee onboarding;
• customer support;
• invoice processing;
• report generation;
• sales approval workflows, etc.

One of the cases we worked on was the development of a Retool app for the travel agency. It is a feature-rich app for managing the company’s scheduling system and client information. For example, it has tools for capturing personal data for each customer. It can operate with such data as names, birthdates, addresses, and other relevant information.

Moreover, it can automatically generate reports based on different templates. This helps the company to save 120 employee hours every month. More info can be found here.

Challenge 4. Complex regulatory and compliance requirements

Regulations frequently change. This means that to remain compliant, organizations need to continuously monitor, update, and adapt their processes. If they fail to do it, they may face fines, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. The task of keeping up with all possible changes becomes even more complicated when businesses operate in multiple regions or markets. In such a case, they need to handle diverse compliance standards.

Solution: Platforms for low-code development often include compliance tools and different features that help businesses meet regulatory requirements more easily. Libraries on some platforms contain pre-configured templates and frameworks compliant with the most common regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. Such templates usually include ready-to-use workflows and tools tailored to meet specific regulatory standards.

For instance, HIPAA-compliant platforms can provide secure workflows for patient data handling and can automatically generate audit logs for healthcare-related transactions.

Apart from this, low-code platforms can offer real-time insights into the compliance status of the built apps. If any areas of non-compliance or risk are detected, a team will get a relevant notification.

Challenge 5. Limited scalability

Legacy systems are built on outdated technologies that often have rigid architectures. Due to this, they cannot easily adapt to changing requirements or support modern capabilities.

The process of upgrading such solutions often requires significant resources, time, and effort.

Apart from this, traditional development approaches that are used for interacting with legacy systems greatly slow down all related tasks.

Solution: Many low-code platforms are built on cloud infrastructure. This allows them to offer on-demand scalability to handle increased workloads without additional hardware or infrastructure investments.

These platforms enable businesses to scale their apps effortlessly to accommodate growing data volumes or transaction loads. Modern low-code platforms are often equipped with features like auto-scaling. Thanks to this, resources can be dynamically allocated during peak demand periods. At the same time, they can be scaled down when they are not required. This helps to optimize costs.

This feature can become highly valuable in various domains, including eCommerce. A lot of online marketplaces experience a surge in demand during holiday seasons. Low-code software can ensure seamless changes based on real-time load jumps and drops.

If you want to learn more about the capabilities of such platforms, you can read low-code case studies on our website.

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Low-code platforms: Trends to watch out for

The low-code space is evolving rather fast under the influence of the broader tech market trends. That’s why if you are considering using such low-code development tools, you should understand what is happening in this field and what features of these tools you need to pay attention to.

1. Wide adoption of low-code services. Today, the use of low-code tools is not limited to some particular niche markets. Given all the opportunities that such platforms can provide, they can bring value to any business in any domain.
2. Increased demand for intelligent business process automation. The growing demand for automation stems from companies’ need to boost productivity and reduce manual work. Namely, this is required to enhance their competitiveness in digital markets. Therefore, today low-code platforms offer a lot of solutions for automating business processes quickly and efficiently.
3. Seamless interoperability and integration. Overall digitalization is gaining traction. The number of tools and apps that companies use in their work is continuously growing. One of the main challenges is to ensure the smooth functioning of such interconnected IT ecosystems. Amid this demand, low-code tools are greatly focused on offering reliable ways to ensure this. Many of them provide a wide range of pre-built connectors for third-party systems as well as allow businesses to make custom integrations.
4. Integration of AI-powered development tools. AI can greatly enhance the interaction with low-code platforms. It can generate recommendations for users based on the app type and users’ individual preferences. Moreover, the most advanced platforms are enriched with natural language processing (NLP) tools. It means that they can generate components or offer logic flows based on requests made in a human language.
5. Combination of traditional and low code development methods. Combining no-code and low-code platforms with traditional development can fully revolutionize software creation. This integrated approach can offer rapid development alongside the customization and scalability of traditional coding. Moreover, it reduces reliance on specialized developers, lowers costs, and enables fast innovation and testing. With all these benefits, it’s not surprising that more and more businesses prefer it.

We analyzed these and some other important trends in more detail in one of our previously published blog posts. If you want to learn more about them, we recommend you read it.

Wrapping up

As you can see, the range of low-code use cases is rather wide. Such platforms can be efficiently applied to solve various business tasks. Of course, all of them have their own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses. This means that none of them is universal. While considering available options, you need to analyze various platforms in the context of your own business activities and requirements.

However, what unites them all is the benefits that they can ensure. Low-code automation software provides a balance between flexibility and simplicity. At the same time, it enables organizations to innovate quickly, automate workflows, and stay competitive in the dynamic business world.

If you need any professional consultation related to low-code development or you are looking for experts who work with such tools, at Akveo, we can always help you. Don’t hesitate to contact us and share your business pains. Our specialists will find the best solution to address them.