4 Benefits of Custom Solution Design

In order to keep pace with changing market trends and the competition, IT professionals must be constantly looking for ways to improve their operational efficiency and capitalize on the insights that new technology can offer. Technology leaders frequently turn to custom solution design to build applications necessary for their businesses, but the old model of solution design requires expensive developer talent and cumbersome periodic updates. Now, new platforms, boasting environments enabling low-code development, provide the agility required to quickly roll out necessary applications without sacrificing user productivity and overall usability.

Enter: Low-Code Development

At a fundamental level, solution design is the process of designing an application to optimize for aspects such as user interface, user experience, functional tasks, and technical workflows. At a higher level, advanced solution design can include applications that synthesize data from multiple business systems or roll up cloud connectivity, the latter of which are gaining significant traction on a global scale and are critical to unlocking features such as digital twin and IIoT connectivity. 

Rather than patching together “good enough” products and adding on customization to achieve functionality — which is a common theme in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) space that often leaves systems inefficient and inaccessible — leading businesses are considering the advantages of low-code application development as a means to achieve custom solution design. Low-code consists of a visual integrated development environment (IDE) and a modular process that includes drag-and-drop functionality, ultimately providing an intuitive interface to developers of all skill levels and accelerating development. 

Compared to traditional programming methods, low-code development offers a higher degree of internal control over coding boundaries, a more cost-effective environment that enhances developer efficiency, and application “blocks” that are continuously updated by the provider for security patches or other technological improvements over time. 

The ability to roll out scalable applications at speed is especially valuable if your organization is embarking on a digital transformation strategy, an initiative that will require customizing applications, changing fundamental infrastructure, optimizing existing systems, and extricating non-core functions such as product information management, warehouse management, work-in-progress (WIP) inventory management, customer service management, supplier collaboration, facilities and asset maintenance from the current ERP.

Digging deeper, let’s explore four reasons why your organization should utilize low-code development to roll out your next applications.

1. Faster Transformation

If your company uses any type of technology, you understand that new solutions and IT services evolve at breakneck speed, meaning what is in use today will be outdated tomorrow. Just as the tech industry is never set, your company can’t be stagnant if you’re to succeed in highly competitive markets that demand constant transformation and innovation. A low-code platform can breathe new life into your development team and processes by:

• Removing complexities when building new applications to more easily keep pace with changing business conditions and industry modernization shifts
• Enabling your organization to change at the speed of thought and innovation, rather than at the speed of in-house bureaucracy and backlogged developer projects

2. Higher Productivity 

The age-old adage of working smarter than harder can apply to any type of business, especially companies that are constantly trying to launch new projects and applications in tight timeframes. With a low-code platform that enables your organization to achieve custom solution design, your employees will be able to:

• Develop more applications in less time, boosting productivity across the entire information technology team
• Devote less time performing quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) tasks, thanks to the block-driven, modular design 

3. Decreased Costs

Companies, regardless of size or industry, are cut from the same cloth in that they’re always looking for ways to be more efficient with their capital management. If your organization wants to utilize an effective cost-savings strategy, low-code development is an ideal fit because:

• More applications can be developed in less time, which decreases overall personnel costs
• Variable costs are eliminated since external developers aren’t needed to build applications
• Low-code platforms are maintained by vendors, so your team doesn’t need to constantly refresh coding or implement security updates internally
• Applications developed can replace licensed and often redundant systems, while conforming to your unique business processes

4. Improved Personnel Agility

Traditionally, businesses have used the waterfall methodology, in which each step cannot move forward until each preceding step is completed. The industry is moving toward agile development principles, which enable flexibility by sharing talent across teams based on needed capabilities, which further allows companies to make iterative changes during a project. 

DevOps has also gained steam among companies that want to achieve faster software deployments. DevOps enables businesses’ information technology and software development team join forces to unify development and operations to react more quickly to changing business conditions. 

With low-code environments, your organization’s employees will benefit from improved agility for both agile development and DevOps practices by:

• Achieving greater orchestration, standardization, and automation that enables them to develop apps at a higher velocity than traditional programming
• Bridging any gaps between development and operations teams to unify application lifecycle management 

Start Your Solution Design Today

The market for low-code development platforms is projected to skyrocket in the near future, increasing from approximately $4.3 billion in 2017 to more than $27.2 billion by 2022, good for a compound annual growth rate of 44.5%. According to research by Markets and Markets, various factors are contributing to this level of expansion include greater demand for software automation, proliferation of cloud-based, low-code development customized to companies’ liking, and increasing need for the development of both mobile and web applications.

If you’re looking to join other businesses racing to utilize low-code development to enhance operational efficiency, BoomDTC can help. You can learn more about how BoomDTC’s iterative prototyping and user testing can accelerate your solution design here.