Digital transformation in today’s business climate is akin to getting a website for your company back in the 1990s. Many leading organizations are doing it, and those that aren’t may get left behind. But digital transformation can be difficult — and expensive — especially when you need to create your own software or automated workflows.
This is where low-code digital transformation can make a huge difference. You can save time and money, perform the transformation in-house, and bring more stakeholders to the table.
Key Insights
- Low-code digital transformation enables more agility because you can quickly create solutions internally without having to bring in outside programmers or consultants.
- Low code is a powerful tool for uniting data from disparate apps by building your own integration solution.
- LANSA gives you a low-code platform where you can create a digital transformation solution by quickly dragging and dropping pre-built components into an intuitive user interface
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of using digital technology to make business operations more efficient and effective. It often involves automating processes using custom-designed workflows and/or software. Digital transformation is also used to glean business intelligence by harvesting and processing operational data.
How Low Code Digital Transformation Benefits Different Industries
While virtually any industry can benefit from low code digital transformation, here are a few that often see significant productivity gains.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector often depends on legacy hardware and software that, while dependable, may not enable data-based insights or automated workflows. Using a digital transformation, manufacturers can pull data from different machines and software to automate their supply chains, order fulfillment, and how they procure materials.
IT
IT teams often use digital transformation to automate how they handle customer and employee requests. For example, they can take a laborious, manual ticket management system and automate it. In this way, they can automatically send each request to the best technician, reduce the time it takes to fix issues, and better organize their team.
Healthcare
Similar to manufacturing, healthcare organizations often wrangle with legacy systems that produce data in silos. Using digital transformation, healthcare organizations can unify data from billing, accounting, inventory, and their scheduling system to run more efficiently. In this way, they can serve more patients while providing better care to each one.
Why Is Digital Transformation Important for Your Business?
Digital transformation is important for your business because it future-proofs your organization and gives you a competitive advantage. Here’s how low-code digital transformation gives you an edge.
Improving Operational Efficiency
By using low-code digital transformation to automate core processes, you can operate more efficiently, saving time without sacrificing quality of service.
For example, a transportation company with a distributed architecture can design an automated workflow that chooses the closest driver to the warehouse where they’ll pick up an order. They can also automatically calculate the distances between pickup and delivery points and then have the system use this data to choose the most fuel-efficient vehicle, taking capacity and road conditions into consideration as well.
Boosting Employee Satisfaction
Low code digital transformation improves employee morale by reducing the number of tedious, time-consuming tasks they have to do. In some cases, it may free up so much time that employees get the opportunity to use their creativity and business prowess to help create meaningful solutions. By honoring their mental capacity instead of relegating them to tasks a computer can do, you make them feel like valuable additions to the team.
Gaining an Edge on the Competition
Whether you want to outsell your competition by lowering prices or producing a higher-quality product, low-code digital transformation can play a key role. When you weave automation into lengthy processes, you can produce more in less time — and while spending less money on payroll. This can reduce overhead and enable you to charge less than your competition.
In many cases, using low-code digital transformation to automate elements of your customer service can make it easier to serve more customers in less time and with less staff. This makes it possible to respond to customer requests faster than the competition and provide satisfying results quicker.
Digital Transformation Objectives
The purpose of a digital transformation is to add efficiency and improve the quality of your end results, both of which have a positive impact on your customers and employees.
Do More with Less Time
By doing more in less time, you can significantly cut costs. For instance, a wholesale company can use low-code digital transformation to automate its inventory management system and integrate it with its ordering solution. Therefore, instead of scrolling through spreadsheets looking for parts and components, those in charge of order processing simply have to quickly approve or adjust the orders their automated system generates.
Improve Customer Experiences
Customers’ tastes and needs change frequently, which makes agility essential to any modern business plan. Using low-code digital transformation, you can build workflows that make creating new ideas and implementing customer feedback faster and simpler.
For instance, a consultant can build a cost estimation system using low code and give it to their customer at the end of their engagement. This empowers the customer to perform some of their own cost analysis using a custom-built app, designed specifically for their needs. How many consultants deliver that? The competitive advantages, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction, are unlimited when you use low-code digital transformation.
Integration for Data-Based Decisions
The work involved in gathering data is enough to hamper the efforts of even highly motivated decision makers. But with low-code digital transformation, you can build a system that automatically pulls data produced by business apps and processes. You can also make the solution produce reports that generate business insights based on the data.
How Does Low Code Support Digital Transformation?
Low code supports digital transformation by making it fast and easy to build apps and automated workflows.
The leading low-code platforms provide you with drag-and-drop tools that make it easy to build effective solutions. They also come with pre-built components that have been tested for stability, giving you a more reliable end product.
Bringing More Experts to the Dev Table
Low-code digital transformation platforms give those with little to no development experience the ability to contribute to dev projects. You don’t need to hire external experts or send internal employees to coding school. They can hit the ground running, building strong solutions right away.
Reducing Time-to-Market
By building and testing more iterations quicker, you enable faster deployment. Also, instead of having to pour through hundreds or thousands of lines of code to fix a bug, you can quickly narrow down the source of the problem by focusing on each low-code component and their connections to the database and each other.
Closing Talent Gaps
A development platform that is easier to use is more accessible to those with little knowledge of specific programming languages. Armed with a low-code digital transformation platform, you pave the way for business leaders and experienced managers to leverage their years of experience to build winning solutions — even if they’re relatively new to programming.
Lowering Costs
You don’t have to hire expensive specialists, send existing employees back to school, or pay for many hours of development time. Since low-code tools offer easy onboarding and a gentle learning curve, you can stick with your in-house team, often without affecting your salary figures at all.
Solving Digital Transformation Challenges
Here are some common challenges and ways low-code digital transformation can solve them:
- Long digital transformation projects may take many months. With low code, you can often produce a minimum viable product (MVP) in a few weeks instead of several months.
- Employees who prefer the old way. Intransigent or somewhat reticent employees can be brought right into your development team because low code is so easy to use. This empowers them, gains their support, and makes them feel like a valued part of the solution.
- Integrating the data from legacy systems. Using a low-code platform that supports many different data formats, you can build automatic data transformations that bridge the gap between legacy systems and your modern solution. In some cases, your low-code solution may have presets matching the exact kinds of data you need to integrate.
To learn more about how low-code can solve even more challenges and bring broad benefits to your organization, check out our complete guide to low-code development.
How Can LANSA Support Digital Transformation Goals
LANSA gives you all of the benefits of low-code app development, making what would otherwise be complex, time-consuming digital transformations smooth and efficient.
Reface Legacy Applications
While there are many low-code use cases and examples, refacing legacy applications is one of the most helpful, primarily because it makes it possible to keep your legacy apps and hardware. With LANSA, you can quickly build modern user interfaces by porting data from legacy IBM i applications. Users will feel like they’re using a modern web app.
Expand Applications by Transporting Them to the Web
Expanding on-premise applications to the web is one of the best ways to reinvent your business with technology, especially because it gives disparate, remote workers access to the apps they need to do their jobs from anywhere. LANSA’s low-code digital transformation platform streamlines this process by providing you with pre-designed templates and workflows that make transporting apps to the web fast and easy.
Develop New Apps from Scratch
Have a great idea for an app but lack the time or resources to build it? No problem. With LANSA’s low-code digital transformation tools, you don’t have to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, never mind Swift and Kotlin, to create great apps from scratch. Just drag and drop your components into place and craft effective business logic and a user-friendly interface in a fraction of the time it would take with hard coding.
Extend Apps by Adding Mobile Functionality
You can accelerate your digital transformation with low code in the cloud and, as a result, add mobile functionality for end users. When you use LANSA to build a cloud-based solution, you essentially lift a legacy app into a cloud environment. In the same manner, you can create new apps in the cloud — or build ones that enable cloud-hosted automated workflows — making them available to teams and customers across the country or the world.
Use Low-Code Development for Agile Digital Transformation Innovation
With LANSA, you can introduce unprecedented agility to your organization because LANSA’s drag-and-drop programming tools are so simple to use. This cuts the time between ideation and MVP down to a few weeks — or even less — depending on the complexity of your app idea. When customers or competition come up with an idea that necessitates a quick pivot, LANSA’s tools make it easy to build an effective solution quickly.
Leverage LANSA’s Development Services
Don’t want to build your solution yourself? No problem. LANSA’s experienced developers can handle it for you. After getting to understand your business model, goals, and ideas, LANSA’s team can translate them into an MVP and then test and improve it. The team can also incorporate adjustments and ideas along the way, if necessary.
Low-Code Trends That Speed up Digital Transformation
The following trends are making low-code development even faster, which increases your agility while reducing your costs.
AI-Powered Development
AI’s prowess in producing custom, hard code is well-documented, but it’s also helpful when building low-code solutions. At times, you may need to use some hard coding to customize a low-code project. If so, you can have a generative AI system write the code for you.
AI can also design your business logic and database layouts. This adds speed to the ideation and creation process.
Also, if something malfunctions, you can describe your architecture and tools to an AI-powered system, and it can tell you what may be the problem.
A Stronger Focus on Security
Security is more top of mind than ever before thanks to a plethora of hackers lurking through the web. But low-code digital transformation tools can limit the number of vulnerabilities that could keep you up at night.
For instance, when dealing with a reputable low-code platform like LANSA, you do not have to worry about using framework components that hackers have found ways to exploit. You also get components that the platform will continue to support, unlike many frameworks, which are riddled with deprecated components.
Mobile-First Design Principles
Mobile-first design involves building apps designed to fit the screens and conform to the workflows users expect while using mobile devices. Low-code tools are now incorporating pre-made building blocks that look great on mobile devices and use functions native to iOS and Android operating systems.
Enable Cost-Effective, Stable, Secure Digital Transformations with Low Code
You can enable a digital transformation program that gives you agility, stable apps and workflows, and secure end products with LANSA’s low-code platform. In addition to adding convenience and speed, LANSA also reduces your development costs. Learn more by connecting with a LANSA expert today.
