By: Kenneth Amann, Executive Consultant, CIMdata, Inc.

Manufacturers are under continuous pressure to evolve, improve their operations and deliver value to their customers and their stakeholders. They are developing increasingly complex products and systems of systems that require integrating specialized technical and IT tools, expertise and data repositories distributed across an extended value chain/ecosystem.

Success requires manufacturers to digitally transform themselves while integrating a diverse, heterogenous extended enterprise (e.g., other divisions, partners, suppliers, customers and regulatory agencies). They must establish seamless, secure, collaborative environments that can easily and rapidly evolve as their business needs dictate.

Such a digital transformation enables the evolution into next-generation business-specific solutions and the creation of a flexible, digitally-driven business. Each business needs to develop end-to-end digital threads and comprehensive digital twins without requiring scarce or costly IT resources. The digital thread and digital twins must be able to leverage data quickly and easily from anywhere, in any format, and deliver that data to the requiring user (or system or device) in the proper context. Each business must integrate the internal and external applications and information repositories to enable flexibility and deliver for-purpose productivity.

The challenges facing modern manufacturers are numerous, including:

• Creating and maintaining global value chains and operations.
• Working in a secure environment.
• Developing and supporting complex, smart, connected products and being smart about how they do that.
• Improving the quality of their products and services.
• Creating and supporting personalized products for their customers and personalized, business-unique applications for their organization.
• Establishing collaborative workflows across a globally-connected value chain of customers, partners and suppliers.
• Creating sustainable products in a sustainable manner.
• Being agile and flexible to rapidly respond to market and business changes.
• Becoming a more digitally-driven integrated extended enterprise.
• Digitally transforming the business to be more efficient.
• Continually improving their cost-effectiveness as well as shareholder and customer value.

Many organizations struggle to sustain their current IT environment and most have a large backlog of requests for new capabilities and updates or fixes to current applications. The IT organization often has limited time and/or lacks the skilled resources needed to respond quickly to all of the requests and needs of the business. This means IT frequently takes too long to make the necessary changes to digitalize business and product development processes, including changes in the supply chain. This results in continuing—and growing—inefficiency, lost market opportunity and reduced customer and brand loyalty.

A primary reason for the typical backlog of IT requests is that traditional application development methods tend to be lengthy and expensive, and do not provide the flexibility and capabilities that companies need to be able to rapidly respond to market changes. Using agile development methodologies powered by a low-code application development platform that connects data sources and builds applications is an excellent, and proven, approach for creating extended digital threads or workflows that span the value chain ecosystem required for true business digital transformation.

What is Low-Code Development?

Low-code is a modern approach to software development that simplifies and accelerates delivery and integration of business-specific applications. It uses a graphical user interface to create logic in an easy to use drag-and-drop paradigm instead of requiring coding languages such as C++. By requiring little to no coding to build applications and processes, it streamlines development and accelerates the delivery of personalized, fit-for-purpose business applications. Intuitive low-code tools enable domain experts without formal knowledge of coding or software development (often called citizen developers) to create effective, cross-organizational and tailored business applications.

Based on microservice architecture that provides functional capabilities, low-code development platforms support building blocks that can easily be assembled into applications and entire business solutions. Businesses can create multi-experience  applications for server, desktop, laptop and mobile, and can streamline workflows without having to rework and maintain separate code environments for each format. This enables domain experts to have more time to focus on business issues rather than software development, as well as assisting professional developers to tackle bigger and/or more complex areas in the application development process.

Benefits of Low-Code Development

A key benefit of low-code development is that it enables the creation of personalized solutions in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods—accelerating time to deployment and value. Business-specific applications can integrate data and processes across functional domains and the enterprise value chain—creating the digital thread of information and collaboration required to accelerate business and individual performance.

Low-code applications can be accessed and used via multiple devices including phones, tablets, AR/VR, laptops and more, and by personnel at all levels of an organization. They can be delivered anywhere, anytime, using cloud infrastructures. This significantly improves the business value, as the information and processes supported by the application are available to any appropriate user regardless of their location and time zone.

Because low-code developed applications can be personalized, they provide an enhanced end-user experience, which improves individual and organizational productivity and enables faster adoption across the user community.

Modern low-code application platforms make it easy to incorporate the requisite governance to ensure conformance to IT standards, including security—thus enabling more effective risk management and enforcing applicable protocols. Applications needed by the business can be delivered in a manner acceptable to the CIO.

Additionally, leading low-code platform solution providers offer pre-developed applications via a developers’ marketplace, which can be quickly adapted to a company’s specific requirements. This further reduces the time and cost of creating new applications needed by a business.

Benefits of using a modern low-code platform include:

• Staff at all levels and skills can easily create personalized, business-specific solutions.
• Data and data sources can be linked to create an extended value chain digital thread.
• Businesses are provided greater flexibility to address changes while optimizing productive uses of limited IT resources.
• Transformations of the business in response to market shifts are easier and faster.
• Low-code components can be reused in other applications and are easier to upgrade, more sustainable and governed and maintained with lower costs.
• Portability improvements—operating at digital speed means quickly creating app capabilities users require to function smoothly across multiple devices.

The pressures on manufacturers are enormous: globalization, competition, product complexity and pricing are primary drivers. Companies need to find ways to lower costs, improve quality and shorten time to market. Product and process innovation are the most promising routes to address these pressures. Digital transformation is the strategy that best supports such innovation.

Many technologies address digital transformation, but leveraging a low-code development platform has helped many companies adapt and extend their current applications as well as quickly create new ones. It enables a company to address issues that hold back collaboration, data integration and workflows, while creating tailored multi-experience solutions incorporating artificial intelligence and leveraging the cloud. It enables domain experts and professional developers to individually and collaboratively create enterprise-grade applications that address the needs of the business. Low code is a transformational capability essential to business success, especially in today’s fast-moving, complex industrial markets.