Low-Code systems are a revolution

Low-Code is the future standard for all enterprise apps and business process management software. The tools provided by the ELMA365 Platform cover not only business processes but all the levels of creating a business app.
Today, digital products give a competitive edge to business in any industry, so the demand is high. There is always a shortage of programmers. The communication between the programmers and the analysts, who make the actual requirements, slows down the dynamics, all leading to solutions that are neither agile nor up-to-date.
Therefore, more and more attention is drawn to the Low-Code approach, where enterprise apps are created not entirely by programmers, but by a team of business users and analysts. The flexibility of this approach makes it easy to set aside the bad decisions and take the good ones to production faster.
ELMA products have always aimed at providing means for visual development. In our software we try to give the analysts and business users the tools that they could easily use right away. This is only logical, since these are the people who manage the logic of the business processes, they should be the ones able to modify the processes as required. The programmers get involved when it comes down to more detailed tasks such as integrations.
In automation software, it is important that the business processes are created intuitively. That is, without complex integrations or sending information to and fro between the analysts and programmers. Otherwise, you will be engaged in six-months-long development cycles and end up with solutions that are out of date by the time they are released.
The speed of implementation has always been one of ELMA’s main characteristics. Business users are easily engaged in visual modeling, and just like that, business, programmers and analysts collaborate to create their future solutions. This is Low-code in action!

As for positioning and defining the Low-code, I prefer to use it as an adjective, not as a name for a separate class of software. This is why we define our products as “Low-Code platforms for business process automation”.
You can often see that our competitors use the term Low-Code to name platforms for creating responsive custom forms for user interfaces. In our case, the system is actually a builder of business processes. This means that the visual design doesn’t stop at designing workflows, it also allows you to create a data storage system and app interfaces for users.
Moreover, the system is focused on the business context. Yes, the core of the product is BPM software with inbuilt tools for working with documents, and a bunch of other built-in solutions.
There is a range of BPM modelers that ignore the business context; they are usually No-Code solutions. I do not believe in their efficiency. In such systems, you have to create your business apps starting from scratch. There are no built-in reports, no monitoring tools. Escalation and substitutions have to be set up. Business users simply cannot work with that, the task becomes too complicated from the technical point of view. I am proud to say that our product uses the Low-Code approach to create not only prototypes but actual commercial solutions that can be immediately put to work and are ready to deal with anything that comes their way.

It is worth saying that this approach does not put a limit on the scale of the projects.We added a wide range of solutions to our platform, from HR portals with internal processes to apps for a bank’s front and back office operations.
Our implementation projects are divided into two parts: one is carried out by a team of business users, and the other one is done by programmers. Which is basically implied by the term Low-Code itself.
Business users, who are mostly analysts, create the solution using readymade componentes, without coding. This is similar to No-Code, although more complex due to our focus on business processes. Working on an Agreement is a good example: a template is used to create the actual document, and the built-in activities are used to create it’s route for review and approval. In a similar way you can create dashboards for monitoring and for working with app items. All without any code, making the best of the No-Code concept.
When the in-built functionality is not enough, the analysts make a request to the programmers to develop the necessary tools. At this point, the programmers create custom components such as integrations with external systems, service libraries, activities for complex calculations, dynamic forms and so on.
Dividing the project between analysis and programmers like this drastically speeds it up by directly involving the actual future users of the platform. This leads to a great usability of the developed enterprise solutions.
This concept doesn’t place any restrictions on the complexity of the created solutions. In the worst case scenario, if a task is very unusual and requires a lot of non-standard work, you would simply have to engage more programmers and use the built-in activities a little bit less. Even so, it still has more advantages in comparison to typical development and attempts to customize standard BPM software.

The ELMA365 platform basically sums up our thirteen years of experience in business automation and workflow management, but with new technologies. The first thing that catches the eye is the accelerated speed of both deployment and operation.
Moreover, we understand that not every company can use SaaS due to specific security issues. For such businesses we recently created the ELMA365 On Premise and Private Cloud editions. So the system can be installed on your own servers or even in your own cloud!
I guess that the speed of the system, it’s fast operation is what our clients usually point out. It truly is important. Specific features draw less attention, especially since in that regard ELMA365 is similar to our classic BPM system ELMA4.
The features of ELMA365 that impress our customers the most are the possibility to create a custom CRM and the handy document management capabilities.

As I have mentioned before, Low-code platforms are aimed at two different types of specialists: the first one includes analysts and business users, the second one includes developers. Business users really can implement all the general logic by using the visual editor. We often see that solutions are designed by people who are far away from the IT world. Typical industry experts.
We have recently worked on creating a loan pipeline for a large bank. Developers focused on integration with the automated banking system, turning it into ready-to-use activities (system components that can be used in the visual editor). The business logic was completely implemented by industry experts.

It is very simple for regular users to start working in the system. They understand how it works already during the presale. To start, no additional training is required!.
We do carry out certain training though, because the capabilities of our software are enormous. In order to teach people to create more complex solutions, we provide additional training for advanced users.
In this regard we are inspired by Excel: it provides an easy start, yet as the user’s experience grows it never outgrows the program. It is extremely important for a product to be able to provide the user with more profound tools in order to solve more complex tasks.

Often, implementation projects are inefficient not because of the actual solutions implemented, but because of bad collaboration, acceptance and deployment processes. We are now focused on ensuring better cooperation between all the team members in a project. We want to create better collaboration tools and revolutionize software implementation projects.

I totally believe that Low-Code and No-Code can solve the shortage of programmers and provide the businesses with the software they need.
They are already doing a revolution. The No-Code does have evident restrictions. It rather allows to create prototypes than replace programmers. It is a complex product for creating powerful enterprise applications. However, something will always be missing, and the product’s paradigm doesn’t allow expanding it easily. Moreover, today the No-Code solutions do not have a built-in business context and imply creating solutions from scratch. This is neither bad nor good. Still, No-Code solutions provide amazing possibilities for analysts who want to create prototypes or very simple solutions.
As for Low-Code, I feel that it is the future standard for enterprise app development and internal automation. Imagine there was a way to set up the working process so that the results come faster and at a higher quality, while the ideas are implemented by those who actually came up with them. How could you say no to that?

Aleksei Trefilov, CEO

ELMA Global a.s., Slovakia
Panenská 23, Bratislava, 811 03

info@elma365.com
https://elma365.com/en/

ELMA365 software helps companies to orchestrate business processes effortlessly. Thanks
to our scalable architecture and low-code platform, companies can prototype, test and
implement business ideas faster

This release was published on openPR.