What industries can use low-code?
One substantial benefit of low-code technology is its adjustability, meaning that developers can modify codes and add or remove features of preference. Therefore, businesses can build apps that adapt well to niche problems of specific industries and business models.
Finance & banking: Customer-facing app
The finance sector has two top priorities: seamless user experience and high security. All transactions must be swift and error-free. Users must be able to instantly access desired services with the lowest waiting time. Customer data must be secured and undisclosed. Finance firms can achieve these goals by using low-code.
Here is what you can build:
- Mobile Banking App: Your customers can check account balances, transfer money, and pay bills on the go. Some even go further with add-on services such as booking plane tickets or topping up their mobile cards.
- Audit and Reporting Tools: These internal processes are lengthy and prone to errors when done by hand. Meanwhile, low-code can easily automate this with precision, from handling internal audits, tracking compliance to generating data reports for you.
- CRM: Create a panoramic view of your customer data and history of interaction for your business. From these insights, you can optimize your services and marketing strategy.
- Automate customer onboarding: Welcome your customer with a seamless experience using a mobile app or self-service portals. Save time for your executives by streamlining background checking and ensuring the right Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
- Loan solutions: Develop systems to manage the loan lifecycle, including checking applications, underwriting, disbursement, repayment, and risk assessment.
- Integrated Core Banking System (CBS): With the help of low-code, bank branches can strengthen their cross-integration, payment gateways, and other third-party systems
- Self-service portal and helpdesk: Low-code’s self-service portal now offers customers an intelligent and seamless experience.
Real-life low-code example: Bendigo Bank, one of the largest banks in Australia, reorganized its strategies to prioritize the customer experience. With low-code, the bank has successfully deployed 25 customer-focused enterprise apps in 18 months, including ATMs Management, Credit Card Management, Fraud Management, Disputes, Loans, Mortgages, and so on.
Read this article for more detailed: Leveraging Low-code for Financial Services: Yes or No?
Government: Citizen-facing app
The public sector usually has a slower digital transformation rate than other industries. Most public services are reported to be lengthy and sluggish, causing citizens’ dissatisfaction with general services.
Low-code technology can assist the government in building better solutions in many aspects.
- E-Government Service or Mobile App: Governments can use low-code to build online self-service portals or apps on which citizens easily access public services and information. For example, citizens can apply for permits, report issues, and pay for services.
- Emergency Response and Management Applications: Build apps that can provide critical information during natural disasters or crises, coordinate emergency services, and report real-time incidents.
- Public Health Surveillance System: Track and manage public health data, such as virus outbreaks, vaccination rates, and healthcare resource allocation, and makes timely public health responses.
- Case Management Systems: Build low-code systems to track and manage social service programs, such as welfare, unemployment benefits, or housing assistance.
- Public Feedback and Engagement Platforms: Low-code technology can assist the government in gathering public feedback, fostering community engagement and informed decision-making.
- Transportation and Traffic Management Systems: Build low-code solutions to control public transportation schedules, real-time traffic conditions, and infrastructure maintenance.
- Voting and Election Management Systems: Through low-code, governments can develop secure online platforms specified for voter registration, election management, and result tabulation. Systems like this can enhance the transparency and efficiency of electoral processes.
Real-life low-code example: The city of Rotterdam was stuck in a lengthy process, with low response rates and outdated interactions with citizens. Their IT department was also not the most potent force and faced a talent shortage.
To tackle this, they deployed low-code in 2018 and developed over 100 applications for their city. So far, 40% of solutions are for the public to enhance city management and increase trust in public services. 60% are for improving internal processes and cutting down paperwork with automation.
eCommerce: Online store
Platforms like Shopify, Printify, or Woo can assist you in building a low-to-no-code e-commerce business platform with all basic functions. Here are some common types of low-code apps that soon-to-be e-commerce businesses can develop.
- Custom Online Storefronts.
- Inventory Management Systems: to track inventory, orders, sales, and deliveries in real-time. Issues like understocking or overstocking can be quickly detected and prevented, securing smooth supply chain operations.
- Loyalty Program and Rewards Applications: Through them, you offer points, rewards, and personalized deals to retain customer loyalty.
- Analytics and Reporting Dashboards: Low-code can help visualize and analyze eCommerce metrics through dashboards. These dashboards show sales data, customer behavior, website traffic, and more.
- Order Management and Fulfillment Applications: Businesses can create low-code applications exclusively to automate order management and process automation.
- Product Recommendation Engines: Companies can construct personalized recommendation systems from low-code to analyze customer behavior, purchase history, and preferences to suggest relevant products, thus enhancing the shopping experience and boosting sales.
Not only that, when your business upscales, low-code can also assist in building more advanced apps, namely:
- Invoice Manager: to protect and organize income data while improving their organization and records.
- Customer Service Chatbot: to provide instant customer support, answer commonly asked questions, assist in tracking orders, and improve overall customer service experience.
- CRM and Vendor Management System.
Retail: Operation management tools
Similarly to eCommerce, the retail sector can improve their store performance and management and gain more customers with the help of low-code.
- Inventory Management Application.
- Customer Loyalty and Rewards Program.
- E-Commerce Platforms.
- Supply Chain and Vendor Management System.
- Sales and Performance Analytics Dashboard.
- Omnichannel Customer Service Platform.
- Employee Scheduling and Management: Schedule staff shifts, track working hours, manage leave requests, and optimize staffing levels become more straightforward with the help of low-code.
- Point of Sale (POS) Systems: A custom low-code POS app can integrate inventory, customer data, and financial systems to streamline online and offline sales processes.
- Sales Enablement app: to deal with huge amounts of data. It delivers a comprehensive view of critical performance data, such as pipeline progression, revenue progress, the latest industry news, and more.
- Retail Execution System: improve your retail operation by planning, managing, and monitoring in-store activities.
Real-life low-code example: Floor managers in the NFM store in Texas decided to leverage low-code (Microsoft Power Platform and Teams) to build dozens of solutions that make them better manage daily operations:
- An alert system that automatically notifies the nearest employees when a customer needs help.
- A recovery app to replace the manual registration for area cleanup. Now, sales professionals wouldn’t have to walk across a 560,000-square-foot showroom to claim a cleanup area at the end of the day.
- An in-stock app that informs what is and is not in the inventory, navigating the situation where the supply cannot meet the high demand. The app turned a 45-minute walk in the showroom into a 10-minute encounter with a salesperson.
Healthcare: Hospital management system
Low-code in healthcare elevates patients’ customer service, assuring the best experience during their admission. Furthermore, healthcare professionals handle less paperwork, which frees them up to concentrate on more pressing and immediate tasks. Here’s what low-code can build:
- Patient Portal: patients can schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments online. They can also access personal health information, lab results, prescription lists, and educational materials.
- Electronic Health Records (EHR) Management: safely handle patients’ records.
- Inventory Management Systems for Medical Supplies: manage storage, track usage rates, automate restocking processes, and ensure that essential medical supplies are available.
- Medication Management Application: Low-code helps guarantee effective medication management by creating systems to monitor prescriptions, refills, and adherence to medication schedules. These systems should also include alerts and reminders for patients and healthcare professionals.
- Resource Allocation and Staff Scheduling Tools: Build low-code tools and apps to enhance more effective staff scheduling and resource allocation, like operating rooms, hospital beds, and medical equipment.
- Telehealth Platforms: Low-code can help medical facilities build virtual meetings and remotely monitor patients and operations.
Real-life low-code example: University Hospitals (UH) (Cleveland, Ohio) attempts to engage more male patients in healthcare by deploying a technology-fueled concierge service. This concierge service intently narrows the gender gap and performs earlier diagnoses and treatments with the help of technology.
UH used Microsoft to build this app. Healthcare workers can now seamlessly access patients’ data, track interactions, communicate with patients, check calendars and tasks, and message other workers.
Since the low-code deployment, the UH Cutler Center for Men has improved significantly, saving 90% of the time, from 25–30 to a few minutes per task.
Manufacture: Efficiency optimization tools
Low-code is not solely for automating paper-based tasks. It is also for predicting market trends promptly and managing staff and partners effectively. To do that, manufacturers can deploy low-code as one of these:
- ERP Systems: Factory managers can control raw material procurement and product delivery procedures. A low-code ERP system allows real-time visibility and coordination among suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors.
- Equipment Maintenance and Monitoring Applications: To cut downtime and increase machinery lifespan, develop low-code apps for predictive maintenance, real-time equipment tracking, and maintenance schedule administration.
- Employee Training and Safety Programs: Ensure a knowledgeable and secure workforce by tracking employee training records and scheduling training sessions.
- Inventory Management Applications: Prevent stockouts and overstocking by overseeing inventory status, keeping track of stock movement, and utilizing real-time data to place reorders automatically.
- Production Scheduling Tools: Low-code production scheduling tools increase productivity and efficiency. They allow managers to account for worker schedules, machine availability, and order priorities.
- Quality Control and Compliance Tracking: track compliance with industry standards and regulations, manage audits and certifications, and monitor quality control procedures.
Real-life low-code example: Toyota Motor North America employees have been given access to Microsoft Power Platform and have created more than 400 apps for multiple purposes. A center of Excellence has also been formed to manage all employee efforts, including development, training, and technical support.
Adopting Power Apps and supporting citizen developers helped Toyota address often overlooked issues within their business. In addition, their Power-App-supported solutions positively affected almost every department and day-to-day operations. Toyota’s citizen developers also created apps that digitalize paper-based processes, saving thousands of dollars in material costs.
Insurance: Automated services
Once deployed to the insurance sector, low-code can accelerate customers’ requests while maintaining high accuracy.
- Agent and Broker Management Systems: Develop low-code systems to oversee agent and broker networks, monitor performance, estimate commissions, and offer entry to marketing and policy details.
- Analysis Tools: Create low-code analysis tools to look for patterns and chances of boosting customer satisfaction.
- Automate Claims Processing: These systems will include tools for submitting documents, assessing claims, and communicating with policyholders. Also, streamlining the process can make it more efficient and less stressful for everyone involved.
- Customer Portals: Create secure, user-friendly, and transparent low-code portals where customers can access policy details, file claims, track their claim status and relevant documents.
- CRM: Modify CRM solutions with low-code to handle customer interactions, sales prospects, and promotional campaigns.
- Policy Management Systems: Low-code policy management systems manage insurance policy creation, renewals, and cancellations.
Real-life low-code example: Chedid Capital is a leading global finance company in insurance and reinsurance. To keep up with its worldwide branching and streamline its increasing workflows, they collaborated with Microsoft Power Apps to build a CRM to track and store sales leads. This is the most suitable solution for Chedid as it could tackle the technical backlog without going for an expensive complete CRM solution.
After deploying the new low-code app, sales managers could get a full view of essential data and salespersons’ activities. They also saved more time while working and cooperating on leads. Compared with the previous system, the new low-code one generates sales reports 50% faster, helping sales staff to identify critical areas.
Of course, the use of low-code doesn’t stop at these named industries. As low-code is open for customization, there’s no limitation to what to build with low-code. However, this technology might not be the best choice for certain complex projects, which we will cover later.
Other specific workflows that low-code excel in
Automating HR process
Another common use case of low-code is HR management and automation. Many businesses still rely on spreadsheets and paperwork, making HR process a hassle for both executives and employees.
With low-code, you can either build a comprehensive HRM (which we did with one client in 8 weeks and improve their internal processes by 65%) or automate a specific workflow. Here’re some low-code examples:
- Automate a request-approval process: OT, leave, incentives, repayment request.
- Automate an HR module such as recruitment, leave & attendance management, C&B, payroll and on/offboarding.
- Build an HR database to manage and store your employees’ lifecycle
- Build HR analytics and reporting tools.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Namu Travel Group is a reputable network of luxury travel companies specializing in boutique vacations. After 16 years of steady success, the company decided to make a breakthrough change to” keep the production moving.” Creatio, as a highly flexible low-code platform, is the solution that Namu Travel was looking for.
After Creatio platform was applied, a unified data environment and CRM were created. Since Creatio is flexible and adaptable to usage, it has helped build innovative process adaptations, namely opportunity assigner, event tracking, and profiling.
The result:
- Namu’s ROI index reached 271%
- The customer funnel time has dropped from 10 days to only 6.8 days, easing the bottlenecks.
- Management and service productivity per person now saved up two hours per week
- Service agent productivity witnessed a 10% improvement.
Customer services
Not only that, but low-code also marks its presence in the Customer Service sector. Businesses can utilize low-code technology in one of these ways.
- Customer Support Ticketing System: The application can sort, prioritize, and assign tickets to the appropriate support staff and track each ticket’s status until resolution.
- Feedback and Survey Applications: Businesses can optimize low-code applications to gather, evaluate, and act upon customer feedback and surveys.
- Live Chat and Chatbots: Use low-code to implement live chat features and AI-powered chatbots on websites or customer portals. These features will respond instantly to common queries, instruct users through processes, or report complex issues to human agents.
- Self-Service Portals: Provide safe and easy-to-use low-code portals where clients can access answers for their FAQs, submit claims, and manage their accounts and subscriptions, reducing the need for direct support.
Internet of Things (IoT)
With the help of low-code, entrepreneurs can build apps that enrich their customers’ experience on top of connected devices. You might recognize a few IoT-enabled, quick-to-create apps such as medication temperature monitors, equipment trackers, and service issue notifications.
These apps are connected to IoT platforms, enterprise systems, and third-party systems, supplying enterprises with valuable data. This data can be converted into actionable insights for end-user consumption.
You can apply IoT-enabled apps even in mundane tasks such as real-time data processing. The situation happened with WRSTBND (formerly Solomon Group), a production company specializing in large-scale events. Due to tedious Excel processes, the firm struggled to streamline event planning. With the help of low-code, they have delivered a series of employee applications – a custom ERP, an IoT-turnstile-integrated app, and an RFID VIP Management application.
The IoT turnstiles have increased transparency for staff and regulators post-application, resulting in a $700,000 increase in single-day ticket sales.
When low-code is not the best choice
Despite all the benefits and real-life use cases of low-code platform, it is not always the best choice for business. There are certain areas in which low-code technology will not handle well:
High performance applications
Auto-generated code in low-code might not be well-optimized for performance, especially when execution speed is critical. For the software to process complex data quickly and smoothly, business owners should start with the traditional coding method, which allows 100% customization and code optimization.
High security applications
When developing auto-generated codes, most developers rely on frameworks to meet security standards. However, apps and software will likely go through additional strict security assessments later, which might require significant changes to the code to ensure compliance. In this case, businesses should have their app written traditionally to guarantee security and stability.
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
Due to not being optimized, low-code will require more resources. This might not be recognized at the early stage. However, when the apps work at a larger scale, especially in the cloud or PAYG model, the difference in TCO will be massive.
Accessibility
Low-code applications in general include the accessibility requirement. However, businesses must put more effort into optimizing to operate voice input, screen readers, and other accessibility tools. If low-code is still your choice, it would be best to use it for software prototypes and testing before optimizing it with a traditional method.
Wrapping up
With all the low-code examples mentioned, you can see how it can benefit a business externally and internally. There is no limitation when creating an application with low-code. Yet, it works thanks to pre-coded technology, pre-built templates, and drag-and-drop elements, which are unsuitable for complex applications. Even though low-code allows customization, its source code is still pre-coded and vendor-reliance. In this case, Synodus recommends you switch to traditional coding for more stable, secure, and scalable applications.
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