As a company you are continually looking for solutions that increase sales, save time or improve customer satisfaction. The software with which you develop and launch applications, has a major influence on these achievements. In the retail market, we see that low code offers many advantages. It prepares your organization for business improvements, each of which will provide you with improved results. Are you curious about which improvements can be easily achieved using low-code? Please read further.
Launch applications up to 30 times faster
It is well known that there is a shortage of software developers. We observe that retail companies sometimes have extremely long backlogs because there is insufficient development capacity. Responding to trends and satisfying the requirements of your users, occurs faster and more transparently with low-code software. You save a lot of time and money through the use of more productive IT project teams, as is clearly the case with the Omoda fashion platform. Applications can be launched much faster, because endless lines of code are a thing of the past with Thinkwise low-code.
That the speed of application development increases through the use of low-code, is also apparent from the QSM Europe Benchmark report (2017). Thinkwise low-code makes the development of an application 10 to 30 times faster than with traditional software languages, such as C# or Java, depending on the required functionality. The time that is required to develop new functions and software projects with Thinkwise is 80% lower than the market average. This ensures that you can profit from revenues earlier, can spend budget on innovation instead of maintenance and keep ahead of your competitors. With low-code your core system is ready for the future and your software will never become legacy.
Omoda Testimonial
“With this project we successfully validated various aspects of the platform, including the speed of development, being able to easily export databases, the performance and the possibility to use applications on a mobile device without the need for modifications.”
Save on high costs of manpower
It will not come as a surprise that maintaining legacy software is time consuming and expensive. Excel overviews and other peripheral applications make everything far more complex and are furthermore extremely error sensitive. When employees leave your company or go on vacation, they take their essential knowledge about your peripheral applications with them. This leads to problems and your software starts to cost money instead of it earning money. From our experience it is clear that legacy software regularly hinders innovative ideas, whilst by using low-code you can innovate and respond to requirements from the market much faster. And that influences your customer satisfaction, confidence and competitive advantage.
With Thinkwise low-code you waste little or no costs on maintenance because this requires a minimum of coding effort. This increases productivity and developers have time available that can be spent, together with the business, on the development of new innovative processes. According to the QSM Europe benchmark report (2017) teams that work on projects using Thinkwise low-code are no less than 85% smaller than the market average, which leads to more efficient communication and teams that work better together.
Withstand cyberattacks thanks to built in cybersecurity
The security of outdated legacy software is not always up to date. This is because the software cannot adjust itself to the growing threat landscape. This landscape continues to develop while legacy software stands still. Standing still is a major risk, because you are then less able to withstand cyberattacks. If something goes wrong, for example with customer data, then sensitive information can be made public, you can lose customers due to reputational damage and you run the risk of high penalties. The costs for dealing with a cyberattack can be significant.
Good security measures are essential to control the security and integrity of the business data. Low-code from Thinkwise has a 100% security record due to built in cybersecurity. A penetration test carried out by the independent organization nSEC/Resilience (2020) was not able to cause a data breach or gain control of the server. The Thinkwise platform is subjected to this test annually to continuously validate its security. In contrast to legacy software, Thinkwise grows and develops with the threat landscape. You also place the complexity and costs of good security with the supplier of the low-code platform, so that you do not have to bear the responsibility yourself.
New business insights due to smart data
Another major difference between legacy software and low-code is the acquisition of valuable data. Low-code has many functions with which you can connect many different types of applications, unlike other software solutions. The Thinkwise platform provides the opportunity to easily connect all the data from these various applications in well-organized dashboards. This creates valuable insights into your business, a lot of information about the market that you serve and you can better understand where profit can be made. Low-code gives you a much better insight into your Product Life Cycle, so that you can make even more sustainable choices.Or consider all the valuable sales figures that you can review for each channel or region. Using these insights Category Management can make much smarter choices and reduce the number of returns (Keenan, 2022).
Furthermore, a low-code core system allows you to respond to trends, which is becoming increasingly crucial. For example contactless interaction and merchandizing algorithms.
Reduce costs due to fewer errors
In an effort to modernize legacy software, self-built emergency solutions are often made, for example, with Excel or other peripheral applications. Overviews in Excel with all kinds of hand-coded formulas are error-sensitive and can constitute a major risk. An erroneously placed comma can lead to large losses, for example, the prices for purchases and sales. And that unnecessarily costs too much money.
A low-code solution is far less error-sensitive than using outdated programming languages. Less code means less chance of errors. With low-code you can construct customized applications without a million lines of manually written code. Far fewer errors are made and this reduces your failure costs.
Do you want to know more about low code?
These business improvements are also achievable for your company by opting for a low-code solution. Do you want to benefit from the advantages provided by low-code software? Our retail advisors will be pleased to exchange ideas about the possibilities.
Bibliography
Keenan, M. (2022, augustus 05). The Retailer’s Guide to Supply Chain Management. From Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/retail/retail-supply-chain
QSM Europe. (2017). Thinkwise Benchmark . Breukelen: QSM Europe.