With technology becoming so profoundly woven into every aspect of business, it is now second nature to incorporate it into business strategy. Regularly reflecting on and optimizing how IT is being absorbed as a business function ensures that business units and IT teams can synchronously work towards the business’ goals.
The Struggles of Scale
As organizations scale, performance gaps and problem areas are bound to emerge. While off-the-shelf software solutions are always an option, they force you to fit your business within their limitations.
Customized software applications developed in-house are comprehensive, easily scalable for business growth, tailor-made for specific use cases, and seamlessly integrate with your existing systems.
What’s the catch? Designing and deploying these solutions is a multifold challenge. It is time-consuming and requires heavy capital investment, project planning, and stakeholder management.
How do you take your pick?
Let’s take a step back.
The primary goal of any organization is to deliver products and services which are, ideally, best in class in terms of technology, architecture, and scalability. From a bird’s eye point of view, this seems fine. But when we dig deeper into implementation, we uncover gaps in our business logic, inefficiencies in our workflows, infrastructure issues, and hidden costs, to name a few.
Take, for example, a mid-sized NBFC launches services, only roughly estimating the number of integrations in the project.
Let’s say the project estimate at the beginning was:
- Number of services and products to be launched – 20 to 30
- Number of third-party partner integrations – 40 to 60
- Estimated budget approved – 85 to 100 lakhs
Based on these projections and the decided timeline, the management planned their revenue as 35 to 45 crores for the financial year.
Reality Check
Due to the challenges of numerous change requests, approval timelines, third-party integration bottle necks, etc., any integration project timeline looks something like this:
This is where reality creeps in, and things get interesting.
For integration projects, on an average,
- 30 to 40% additional effort is required due to the back and forth on change requests
- 5 to 10% delays occur due to skilled resource availability and infrastructure issues
While such delays and costs are expected, not planning for them leads to disarray. As a result, the NBFC will now face,
- 30 to 50% cost overruns due to change request related issues/delays
- Go-live delay, increasing the project timeline to 1.3 -1.7x times
- Total cost overrun of 50 to 70%
What can be done?
Now that we have comprehended the enterprise-level challenges around integrations and custom application development, what next?
To address the multitude of challenges during the development of customized enterprise software, we need a solution that offers:
- Easy API Integration, Microservices level architecture, API gateways, and security
- Workflow designers that allow you to flowchart your way to business journeys
- Minimal coding to remove the dependency on IT teams
The answer lies in low code automation solutions.
Gartner predicts that 65% of app development will be entirely low code by 2025.
Forrester Research describes low-code automation platforms as “application development platforms that enable rapid application delivery with minimal hand-coding, and quick setup and deployment.”
Low code is a software development approach wherein little to no coding is required to create an app or a website. Low code solutions have recently gained popularity since they provide a balance between templatized solutions and customizable workflow designs.
McKinsey’s survey states that 57% of respondents indicate their companies are at least experimenting with process automation in one or more business divisions or functions.
Low code solutions like FlowXpert offer visual modes to design and automate applications. FlowXpert’s suite of tools enables you to visually create journeys for digital applications using the drag and drop interface and configurable approach.
It supports business users, and IT teams to collaborate and build applications with modern interfaces, integrations, data, workflow, and business logic, to deliver results in record time.
If optimizing your integrations and application development is a priority for your business, we’re here to help! To discuss how FlowXpert’s features can support you, you can schedule a discussion with our team here.