Low-code provides opportunities for innovation and experimentation while maintaining lower costs, one of the key reasons we are seeing adoption in manufacturing. In fact, according to Gartner, by 2024, low-code will be a major component of application development in enterprises. This large-scale adoption of low-code will result in greater digital advancements that will push even further the digital transformation in manufacturing settings.
We will dive into the benefits low-code can bring to the manufacturing industry, considering that in industrial and shop floor settings every implementation has to answer a big question: How can this improve processes?
Pushing Digital Transformation Through Low-Code
Within manufacturing, the pandemic highlighted the industry’s vulnerabilities when it comes to the disruption of human labor. Bringing people together remotely became a challenge, one that many organizations are still navigating. However, there are many actions they can continue to take as we navigate the new distributed world. Low-code, brings several benefits that help with digital transformation and business strategies.
Low-code provides flexibility for teams to simultaneously work on different applications and test their solutions with a faster turnaround time frame. The decrease in time for creating and testing those solutions accelerates the go-to-market times as well. Going back to the basics, they are able to leverage code readily available to understand how a specific product will perform and the potential challenges they’ll need to address for an improved customer experience. Because using low-code allows for a more swift development time, it can also accelerate the process of testing new features before they are fully rolled out to the public, meaning that manufacturing services can save on costs while maintaining advancing their products.
By leveraging low-code teams also gain the ability to determine positive/negative results with lower costs. Through an accelerated and cheaper testing cycle manufacturers can take further steps to improve their products and/or decide which path they should take to provide the best results. As manufacturing companies continue to adopt technology to ease the transition to an increase in remote operations, the ease and speed of solution creation are vital.
In addition, professional developers will get time back from some of the more mundane programming activities, such as data extraction, therefore speeding up the creation of apps for commodity functions and spending more time on enterprise-class apps that still require higher programming skills. With this expedited process, developers will be able to focus on predicting and reacting to production difficulties, equipment performance problems, and supply chain issues, while resting assured that day-to-day tasks are being delivered effectively.
Low-code development platforms can help centralize key data more easily which simplifies managers’ task of making decisions and maximizing resource utilization while also ensuring accountability across departments. With a low-code approach, developers can easily deliver flexible and efficient applications for various device types, including smartphones, tablets, and workplace computers. Something critical in manufacturing floors – where employees are not in front of a computer.
Low-code application platforms (LCAPs) allow for the fast creation of applications for compliance management and monitoring, as well as seamless integrations through APIs for standardized access and authentication management. LCAPs also have the potential to be integrated easily with current IT systems, something critical in manufacturing given the different technologies adopted over the years, where, in many cases, 10- to 15-year-old hardware needs to communicate with next-gen databases.
Beyond ease of integration, manufacturing vendors that use low-code, can add more value and use it as a competitive advantage. It can assist in the supply chain systems, allowing transparency and efficient communication and collaboration across departments. This leads to quickly bridging gaps between compliance handling inventory (for example, gathering details on exact inventory and shipment location); ensuring data is readily available for all.
Are Low-Code Platforms the Future?
Low-code apps and platforms won’t replace manufacturing execution systems. Rather, they will play an intrinsic role in supporting and extending their value as it provides manufacturing with a toolset to quickly respond to market changes and customer needs.
From accelerating times to market and reducing costs testing new features, low-code can be the key to further implementations and incorporate changes on short notice, hence providing the best experience possible.
