The outbreak of the coronavirus has presented an extraordinary amount of challenges for companies, whether it be forcing them to shift production for essential materials, reconstruct physical workspaces to adhere to social distancing guidelines, or close their doors.
But, it has also presented opportunity.
In the early days of the pandemic, companies moved their workforces and operations remote, worked to ensure their employees and customers were safe, and activated their business continuity plans to reduce the impact of internal and external volatility.
As businesses worked to keep their operations going, this pandemic revealed inefficiencies in some critical processes, like tracking supplier information and supplier risk, increasing visibility into complex projects, and accessing siloed information.
While many companies remain focused on managing risk, growing their market share, and reducing costs, some are using this time to find innovative ways to solve challenges and improve their processes to be better prepared for future disruption.
To address both challenges and opportunities, companies have leveraged low-code platforms to help increase visibility and transparency within their organizations, eliminate inefficient and time-consuming manual processes, and consolidate data in one easily accessible location.
Here are some examples of how we have seen companies use low-code platforms to innovate through the downturn:
Asset Management
A general contract and construction company was having trouble tracking all of their equipment and tools. The company was manually tracking their equipment for projects resulting in inefficiencies given the large number of tools and equipment they needed to regularly track.
Looking for ways to continue to keep employees safe, while also reducing construction delays and costs, and increase revenue, the company used Quickbase to track the parts needed for project with QR codes so employees could scan their inventory. This has helped eliminate the need for manual processes, reducing time and inefficiencies.
Increasing Visibility into Complex Projects
While mergers and acquisitions have been significantly impacted by the coronavirus outbreak, some companies are still working to integrate data and information.
One multinational conglomerate was finding it challenging when it came to merging all of the data and information utilizing legacy and ERP systems and then uploading into SAP. The use of all these different systems resulted in siloed data that was difficult to access. Additionally, employees were relying on a combination of tools to access the data, whether it was Excel spreadsheets or email which was extremely time consuming.
The company found this downturn was an opportunity to streamline and improve their current mergers and acquisitions processes. They turned to low-code to eliminate the need for manual processes and spreadsheets in order to reduce inefficiencies and waste.
Process Improvement
One subsidiary of a large food and beverage corporation quickly adjusted their processes to better serve customers impacted by disruption. They started an initiative to increase their speed to market to quickly get their products to customers, among other strategic goals.
This initiative required an enormous amount of cross-functional coordination between a number of different teams to ensure products could be safely delivered. This project had been previously managed through spreadsheets. One instance of human error in trying to manage a project of this size and complexity in spreadsheets resulted in a significant loss.
To improve and streamline these processes, and with a goal of increasing speed to market, the company turned to low-code to quickly create a custom application to move away from manual processes, better connect teams and address these challenges caused by disruption.
