A great surprise of the sudden shift to remote work is that, rather than suffering business disruption, companies actually became more productive. In fact, the work-from-home surge lifted U.S. productivity overall by 5%, according to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The unexpected results highlight a fact long recognized by management experts, which is that business productivity depends more on systems and processes than on individual workers. Decades ago, business guru W. Edwards Deming argued that a whopping 94% of improvement opportunities involve the system, not the person.
Enter no-code application development. A great promise of no-code development and no-code applications themselves is that they can help raise the efficiency of not just your people but also your processes.
Not only that, but no-code can deliver a productivity and scalability boost in two areas: in your application development specifically, and in your business operations overall.
No-Code App Builders for Leaner Application Development
Traditional application development provides meaningful benefits to businesses. But it also comes with productivity downsides. Of course, newer methodologies such as DevOps aim to automate and accelerate development cycles. But development still involves many manual, time-consuming steps.
The scarcity of highly trained and skilled developers further slows projects. In fact, the gap between the demand for applications and the supply of developers delays digital transformation projects by an average of 8.1 months, according to IDC.
No-code app builders can help. No-code tools enable you to create complete, robust applications without manual programming. Process-savvy business users or citizen developers can quickly and easily build value-adding software for running your business. They achieve this goal by simply dragging and dropping reusable software elements onto a design canvas. Behind the scenes, the no-code tool automatically assembles a functional, stable and secure application.
Citizen developers have embraced no-code, because they like the ability to easily create new business functionality. From crafting simple forms and workflows to producing specific line-of-business capabilities, no-code-produced applications can speed up existing process steps or enable entirely new, more efficient processes.
No-code application builders can also drive efficiency for your development team. Reusable components allow teams to avoid manually coding entire programs from scratch. Plus, no-code frees up technical experts to focus on what they do best: creating sophisticated, function-specific or industry-targeted software that differentiates your company from the competition.
No-Code Apps for Business Productivity and Scale
But the efficiency advantages of no-code don’t stop with application development. Supercharged with no-code-created workflow solutions and reports, your business can operate more efficiently, rapidly and nimbly. It can also quickly scale operations to meet new customer demands or changing business dynamics. No-code applications reach these objectives in a number of ways.
First, the employees in your lines of business are the people who truly understand the daily workflows they manage. So they’re the individuals best-positioned to produce no-code-created applications that fine-tune processes or power new ones. These qualities not only make employees more efficient and productive. They also make them more engaged in their jobs and in your business.
Just as important, employees can easily fine-tune no-code apps to meet changing needs. Let’s say you need to add new steps to an existing process. A team member can easily use the drag-and-drop functionality of your no-code tool to tweak the application for better performance.
What’s more, no-code development tools enable experts in your HR, finance, marketing, sales and customer service departments to work smarter and faster. They gain the capabilities they need to:
Automate tasks – No-code tools enable citizen developers to create applications that accelerate and even automate repetitive but business-critical processes. You can avoid errors, operate more quickly and shift focus to more strategic activities.
Respond to change – If your market is like most, it changes quickly – and constantly. With traditional application development, you can’t respond in time. No-code lets your users fine-tune on-the-fly, so you stay ahead of the competition.
Save costs – Professional development teams can be costly. Since users wielding no-code tools can be much more cost-effective, and because the apps they create speed your operations, you shave dollars through efficiency gains.
Improve and scale – Because the no-code approach lets you create applications when you need them, you can make business improvements whenever the market calls for them. And because no-code applications allow your citizen developers to produce applications on demand, you can quickly scale your business to seize new opportunities.
Digitally transform – Everyone talks about digital transformation. Yet how many companies have actually achieved it in a meaningful way? No-code enables you to extend digitized processes throughout your enterprise. You can progressively automate manual processes and tangibly advance toward your digitization goals.
Ultimately, no-code development tools and no-code-produced applications give you agility to respond to the demands of your market. Business-transforming events like a shift to widespread remote work come along only rarely. But any market, and any company, can face a sudden change in customer expectations or competitive environment. With no-code, you have new capabilities to respond more quickly, operate more efficiently, and scale to achieve new levels of success.
