No-coding business application platforms are designed to solve company-wide challenges and enable large organizations to move with agility.
It’s why their growing popularity and adoption by many Fortune 500 companies comes as no surprise as these platforms enable teams to thrive in a mobile and big-data-driven landscape.
With powerful features such as real-time reporting dashboards to improve decision making, expose trends and manage projects, no-coding solutions can increase customer satisfaction and inspire business transformation to ripple across organizations from all sectors.
With little or no IT expertise required, organizations are building applications to support:
- Payment processing
- Call center and customer support
- Warehouse and factory inventory management
- Retail development
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- HR management
- Project management
- Messaging and Collaboration
Whatever the business challenge, deploying build-your-own business applications can flush out operational inefficiencies, empower lines of business managers and maintain solid IT governance throughout your organization with minimal overhead costs.
Productivity, Collaboration and Innovation
Cloud-based business application platforms can be used at any time on almost any device with an Internet connection -- a benefit that leads to greater collaboration, particularly for businesses with remote employees.
The collaborative nature of business applications eliminates the "corporate silos" and communication gaps that so many enterprises struggle with.
It also builds transparency in the form of real-time charts and graphs to give executive leadership both a glance and detailed view of business operations at all times, whether it's from a desktop or mobile device.
The best no-coding platforms operate in the background to allow managers and their team to focus on the task, not technology. Many feature user-friendly interfaces with built-in collaboration and document sharing tools to eliminate the deluge of disconnected emails and spreadsheets.
Best of all, managers are empowered to create their own applications with little or no technical skills to help them work smarter, not harder. Giving employees the ability to offload menial tasks to automated workflows not only results in fewer human mistakes, but also breeds innovation and the new ideas needed for making an organization its most competitive.
Greater Agility to Respond to Changing Landscapes
No-code platforms have on-demand self-service with rapid elasticity to meet constantly changing demands. As enterprises introduce new products and services, enter new markets and update its workforce, leadership needs a tool that can adapt with the changing circumstances.
Predicting what resources your business will need without overspending is one of the most challenging aspects of running a company or department. This is especially true in IT where time for development and engineering resources are extremely limited.
Rather than having to predict your needs, business application platforms can react to organizational needs as they arise and continuously improve business processes. In the time that it takes for a business person to outline requirements and prepare a presentation to IT, he or she could instead be building and deploying that application to their team.
In addition to the ability to develop one’s own solutions quickly and easily, most no-coding services also have a rich third-party ecosystem to securely connect employees to the tools they already use.
If your organization plans on keeping up with ever-evolving business landscapes, identify an application platform that enables your line of business teams to react as easily and efficiently as possible.
Lower Costs
Cost reduction is one of the main reasons why companies are switching from outdated legacy software to no-code cloud solutions.
Business applications can be automatically updated to support the latest process, removing the time-consuming software maintenance procedures usually associated with traditional software development.
"So you have an IT staff of 20 to 30 people," notes Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at IBM, "and half the time they're tied up in rebooting servers and backing up disks and diagnosing failures and applying patches to software. What if they didn't have to do that any more? Now you suddenly have 10 people freed up to redesign your website, to develop an analytics engine, to do predictive analysis of sales, to create a website for a new marketing campaign."
Additionally, most no-code solutions operate on a monthly subscription plan that can be instantly adjusted up or down depending on how many users are needed. This ensures departments and businesses only pay for what they use. Along with the ability to scale up to meet increased demand, these solutions also allow you to scale down during slower periods and remove users or use less storage space to save you money.
Secure Access from Anywhere
With trends like IT consumerization and remote workforce becoming more popular, employees expect to update projects, assign tasks and view reports from their mobile devices.
According to a 2013 global survey of 590 CIOs conducted by Vanson Bourne, and commissioned by Borland, a Micro Focus company, respondents predict a 50% increase in the number of business apps that need to be made accessible on mobile devices over the next three years (from 31% in 2013 to 46% in 2016).
However CIOs say it takes an average of five months to deliver new versions of mobile applications for existing mobile device updates, confirming they cannot keep up with device vendors releasing updates every couple of months.
Most business application solutions provide native iOS and Android apps to clients that will automatically update to ensure organizations are using the highest quality mobile apps.
Final Thoughts
Business application solutions offer solid benefits that businesses need to meet the demands and take advantage of the opportunities in today's interconnected world. As the world grows smarter and more tasks become automated, no-coding platforms are the next evolution in efficiency and productivity.
Want to learn how else no-coding business application platforms are transforming companies?
About the Author
Nicole is Director of Marketing at Kintone, with 10+ years experience in content strategy, campaign management, lead acquisition and building positive work cultures of empowered, purpose-driven team members. She spent seven years as a journalist, previously serving as a CBS San Francisco digital producer, NPR contributor, Patagon Journal deputy editor and reporter for several publications, including the Chicago Tribune. She's passionate about the tech for good space, social entrepreneurship and women leadership. On the weekends, you’ll likely find her putting her Master Gardener skills to use in at community gardens in Oakland.
