What is low code workflow automation and why are businesses increasingly adopting it into their operations?
As organizations more frequently look to digital solutions as a means to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their processes both internally and externally, the importance that tools like low-code play become more and more important—particularly as regards their role as a competitive differentiator.
In this blog, we’ll be talking about what low-code workflow automation is, how it’s being applied by businesses and what the future holds for low-code regarding adoption among organizations.
What Is Low-Code Workflow Automation?
Low-code workflow automation is a method for creating automation software to facilitate workflow tasks and deploying them quickly through an abridged development cycle compared to traditional means of coding and software development.
Unlike typical ways of application development, low-code operates with a visual platform, allowing developers to take a “drag-and-drop” approach that is far less reliant on standard methods of DevOps.
Because of this, low-code workflow automation projects are cheaper and quicker to develop and deploy, allowing businesses to automate processes that would have previously been considered not significant enough to invest heavily in automation for.
These tasks will often concern manual, repeatable jobs performed by a human—commonly things like data entry, but thanks to low-code can be more sophisticated in nature as regards the workflow-at-large.
As a result of low-code workflow automation, humans can be freed up from having to perform menial tasks and instead can be utilized in a more effective way.
In addition to this, workflow automation allows for significant benefits—not least better visibility and oversight, as well as standardization for compliance purposes for tasks.
Low-Code Workflow Adoption Among Organizations
With companies today competing more than ever on the basis of their ability to leverage data and operate with strong, efficient, and fast workflows, tools like low-code have come to the forefront of decision makers’ ambitions when it comes to digitally transforming their organizations or departments.
It’s not a coincidence that the market for low-code has increased dramatically in value over the last six years, as adoption among SMBs in particular has become commonplace.
The low-code market was worth $1.7 billion in 2015 and estimates indicate it will be worth over $27 billion by 2022—an CAGR growth rate of nearly 50%.
This substantial growth has been driven by what low-code can offer—the cost and operational benefits noted above, but also the ability to involve stakeholders in the process right from the outset because of the less code-heavy development cycle.
In fact, many of those involved in creating these apps are “citizen developers” who are not trained in software engineering but are able to play a much bigger role in the dev cycle, shortening sprints and getting apps to deployment quicker.
72% of low-code developers create apps in three months or less, compared with six months or even years to develop applications using traditional development.
RPA vs. Low-Code
For those wondering if low-code automation sounds eerily familiar to robotic process automation (RPA), then we should probably address the differences between the two.
Generally speaking, RPA is best used when it’s employed to automate simple and repetitive tasks, often in isolation.
These tasks will typically be predictable and routine, making it a rather simple process to implement a software bot to take care of it.
Low-code, on the other hand, is best used as part of a wider strategy of app development across an entire company.
It, too, can be used to automate those simple tasks, but also to build new applications, improve the use of existing applications, and integrate legacy and third-party systems to automatically move data through workflows in a more effective way.
RPA can be thought of as a one-and-done approach to automation, whereas low-code can be thought of as more comprehensive, capable of handling more complex projects while offering more sophisticated opportunities in streamlining workflows across lines of business.