What Is Low-Code Automation? Benefits, Examples

Large enterprises have relied heavily on IT specialists to develop scripts for smooth business operations. However, many companies, including yours, might have struggled with operational challenges due to limited expertise and staff. Low-code automation platforms can help you overcome these issues by minimizing dependency on IT teams and coding requirements. This enables even non-technical users in your organization to streamline the application development efficiently.

The adoption of low-code automation is rapidly increasing across industries. Gartner projected that by 2025, 70% of new applications created by organizations will use at least four low-code development tools, up from 25% in 2020. To stay ahead, consider investing in these platforms that meet your business needs to improve efficiency and encourage innovation.

This article will help you understand low-code workflow automation, including its practical use cases, benefits, challenges, and tips for choosing the right one.

What Is Low Code Workflow Automation?

Low-code workflow automation is a process that allows you to build, automate, and manage your apps with minimal coding. It uses low-code platforms offering pre-designed templates, an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and reusable components to streamline application development.

Numerous low-code tools are available, but they generally come in three categories:

• Low-code Application Platform as a Service: These platforms offer a cloud-based environment where you can develop, deploy, and maintain applications with minimum coding expertise.
• ‍Low-code Rapid Application Development tools: These tools help you speed up the software development process by providing a set of frameworks.
• ‍Low-code Enterprise Architecture Solutions: These solutions focus on aligning business processes with IT systems on a large scale.

Low-code platforms also offer built-in connectors for seamless data integration and data automation across your organization. This reduces the complexity of traditional software development and allows for faster deployment of automated workflows.

With low-code automation, you can easily adapt your processes to evolving business needs, reduce manual errors, and free up resources for more strategic tasks. Since low-code automation helps optimize complex workloads in minutes, you can fully focus on business logic and governance.

8 Practical Use Cases of Low Code Workflow Automation

Let’s take a look at the practical uses of low-code automation:

Pharmaceutical Industry

Pharmaceutical companies involve complex workflows, including handling clinical trials, drug development, supply chain management, quality control, and patient support services. They need to invest substantial time and resources in completing these processes.

Using appropriate low-code tools, the companies can enhance efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. This leads to quicker drug development and improved patient outcomes.

Education

Universities and schools are continuously focusing on refining curriculum development, instructional methods, and learning management systems to improve the quality of education.

A low-code platform helps streamline the creation, update, and distribution of curriculum materials. It allows teachers to develop and deploy custom educational tools for innovative teaching without extensive coding skills. A low-code tool can also help integrate and automate various LMS functions to improve student-teacher interaction and reduce administrative burden.

Mortgage Industry

In the mortgage industry, lenders review and verify the borrower’s loan applications, conduct underwriting analysis, and approve the loan if everything is valid. Borrowers then begin making regular payments and may contact the lender about payment delays or any other issues.

An automation platform enables you to automate these tedious tasks with low-code workflows. It helps mortgage companies focus more on relationship-building and revenue-generating activities.

Industry-Standard UI Design

Building a user interface can be more challenging than developing the core program, as it has to work well across PCs, mobile devices, and the web. Different operating systems also require specific libraries that might not be compatible with other platforms.

Low-code platforms make this process easier by providing industry-standard UI designs in your digital products and apps. You can easily drag and drop the visual components to create a clean and consistent design. These tools offer various UI layouts, helping you quickly build professional web or mobile solutions.

Transactional Systems

Transactional systems are the backbone of many small businesses. However, these systems involve multiple steps and dependencies that can lead to inefficiencies, delays, and errors. Managing these complexities can be challenging, especially for small businesses with limited resources.

Using low-code automation tools, you can develop and automate effective transactional systems. These tools allow you to streamline every transaction process, from order fulfillment to payment processing, all with minimum technical expertise.

Product Recommendation Systems

Product recommendation systems are complex as they must process and integrate large data volumes, such as user behavior, purchase history, and product attributes. Creating personalized recommendations with sophisticated algorithms may also be difficult.

A low-code tool enables you to enhance recommendation systems by quickly refining the recommendation engines without deep coding knowledge. By automating workflows, low-code platforms can help efficiently manage data processing, integrate various data sources, and deploy ML models that drive customized recommendations.

Marketing Systems

Marketers seek assistance from IT departments to develop applications and automate workflows for customer relationship management, performance analytics, and campaign tracking. This process can be time-consuming as it requires extensive collaboration with IT teams to discuss the requirements and refine them accordingly.

In such cases, a low-code platform helps marketers create and adjust applications quickly and efficiently according to their needs. These platforms streamline development and enhance automation, allowing marketers to concentrate on strategic plans and campaign optimization.

API Generation and Integration

You need to write extensive code to define API endpoints, request and response formats, and data handling. Integrating APIs with various systems requires significant effort to ensure compatibility and proper functionality. Manual API documentation and testing can be prone to errors and lead to delays.

Leveraging low-code automation tools allows you to easily generate APIs using their visual interfaces and pre-built components. They also help in integration through drag-and-drop features and automated connectors. Low-code platforms enable the automatic creation of API documentation and include built-in API testing tools to reduce manual errors.

6 Benefits of Low Code Automation

Here are a few benefits of low code automation:

User-Friendliness

One of the most important benefits of low-code automation is that you do not need to know much about coding. According to G2, 70% of people with no coding experience learned how to use low-code tools in a month or less.

Low-code platforms help you develop and automate apps using simple visual interfaces and connect them to your apps with pre-built connectors and APIs. You can then deploy the applications anywhere in just one click.

Empower Citizen Developers

Low-code automation is creating a new group of citizen developers—business users who can build their own automated tools without needing help from IT teams. With low-code tools, citizen developers can design and automate processes because they already know their needs. This way, they avoid spending time explaining requirements to developers and reviewing the process before it is deployed.

Improved Productivity

As companies push for more digital changes to stay competitive, IT teams are under pressure to create new apps. Low-code platforms help them by cutting down development time and reducing complex workloads.

Forrester, a research and advisory company, reports that low-code platforms can accelerate software development up to ten times faster compared to traditional systems. This indicates that IT developers can focus on critical tasks like strategic planning, quality assurance, and market analysis while building more apps and enhancing productivity.

Decreased Costs

Low-code tools help you speed up app development, which minimizes costs associated with creating software solutions. By streamlining the development process, your organization can cut down on the number of developers needed, which lowers labor expenses. Additionally, you can reduce the costs of hardware or software resources required for building and deploying your solutions.

Enhanced Agility

With low-code tools, you can easily adapt to market changes or customer needs without dealing with complicated code. They let you quickly customize and adjust business workflows to meet new requirements. This flexibility will help your organization to stay agile and continue to be valuable as your business evolves.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Low-code platforms are great for staying up-to-date with changing rules and regulations, especially in industries like finance and manufacturing. They help you document and automate workflows so you can quickly adjust to new regulations. Pre-built templates are also very helpful for ensuring that the processes you create and automate comply with industry regulations.

Choosing the Right Low Code Automation Tools

The following section outlines the criteria that you need to consider while choosing a low-code automation tool:

• Vendor Track Record: When selecting a low-code solution, check the company’s history and reliability in the market.
• ‍Understanding the Features: Low-code platforms usually focus on specific business areas. It would be better to pick a tool that matches your business's needs.
• ‍Check with Interfaces: Verify that the low-code platforms’ interface includes visual elements like drag-and-drop, pre-built templates, and connectors for quick application development. It should also allow you to easily utilize the customer support and resources provided.
• ‍Instant Mobility: With low-code workflows, you should be able to build apps in one place and deploy them anywhere.
• ‍Security: To protect your data, the tool must have robust security measures, including compliance certifications, access controls, and an encryption mechanism.
• ‍Team Collaboration: The platform should allow detailed permission settings for team members in your organization to work together effectively.
• ‍Integration: The tool must enable you to connect smoothly with other apps used in your organization.
• ‍Scalability: The platform should support your business growth and handle future needs efficiently.

Challenges in Adopting Low Code Workflow Automation

Let’s discuss a few challenges in leveraging low code workflow automation:

• Job Concerns: When adopting low-code platforms, your employees may worry about job security because automation can handle tasks that were once done by people. This can lead to concerns about job reductions or the need to shift to new roles.
• ‍Superficial Problem-Solving: Traditional development involves business analysts who bridge the gap between your business and technical requirements. Low-code platforms, while offering speed and flexibility, may lack this depth, as developers using these tools might not fully understand the business problems.
• ‍Less Interest in New Tools: Your team members might become less interested in new tools if they feel that the existing low-code tools are already sufficient. This may affect their ability to stay up-to-date with industry trends.
• ‍Governance Issues: The simplicity of building applications with a low-code platform can sometimes lead your business users to create their own apps without IT involvement. This can be challenging for the IT team to monitor and manage all the applications being used across the organization.
• ‍Limited Customization: The pre-built templates and components available on low-code platforms can restrict customization. This leads to application development that does not fully address your business needs.

Enter No-Code Workflow Automation with Airbyte

Low-code automation tools help build and manage workflows with minimal coding. When your data is scattered across different sources, a low-code or no-code tool like Airbyte is ideal for bringing it all together for application development and analytics purposes.

Airbyte, a no-code data integration and replication platform, allows you to transfer data from multiple sources to a preferred destination using its 350+ built-in connectors. If you cannot find a connector, its CDK feature enables you to build a custom connector based on your business requirements with minimal programming skills.

Airbyte’s Standout Features:

• Modern Generative AI workflows: Airbyte helps you streamline AI workflows by loading unstructured data into vector databases, such as Milvus, Pinecone, and Weaviate. Vector stores allow efficient similarity searches and relevance-based retrieval, which is useful for data analysis and enhancing AI workflows.
• ‍Simplify Data Integration with AI: Airbyte’s integrated support for RAG-specific transformations like LangChain-powered chunkings and OpenAI-enabled embeddings enables you to perform the data integration in a single step.
• ‍Efficient Data Transformation: With Airbyte and dbt integration, you can easily develop and implement custom transformations within your data pipelines.
• ‍Developer-Friendly Pipelines: Airbyte provides PyAirbyte, an open-source, developer-friendly Python library. It allows you to programmatically interact with Airbyte connectors to extract data from varied systems in your Python workflows.
• ‍Data Synchronization: Airbyte supports the CDC approach to capture the latest modifications in the source databases and copy them into your target system. This keeps all your information consistent on all platforms.
• ‍Open-Source: Airbyte provides an open-source version that helps you deploy your Airbyte instance locally using Docker or on a virtual machine. This version enables you to use all the built-in connectors, low-code connector builders, and schema propagation features.
• ‍Data Security: Airbyte supports encryption mechanisms, credential management, SSH tunneling, and access controls to transfer data securely across systems. It also complies with SOC 2 Type II assessment and ISO 27001 standards for a safe integration process.

Let’s start using this no-code tool!

Steps to Automate Your Data Integration Workflow with a No-Code Platform

Consider a scenario where you stored software applications’s source code, documentation, data models and schemas, test cases, and deployment scripts in your GitHub account. You may want to load all your GitHub data into a cloud-based data warehouse platform like Google BigQuery for advanced analysis and reporting and to improve operational efficiency.

Here is a quick step-by-step guide to this integration process:

Step 1: Access Airbyte

• Visit the official website and click on Try Airbyte Cloud free or Deploy Airbyte Open Source.
• When you have opted for Airbyte Cloud, create your Airbyte account with Google, GitHub, or SSO.
• Once you are directed to Airbyte’s homepage, you can now start your first data integration project.

Step 2: Configure GitHub as Your Source

Using the following steps, you must set up your data source:

• Click on the Sources option from the left navigation pane of your Airbyte’s admin page.
• Search and select the GitHub connector.

• On the source configuration page, navigate to the Authentication section, choose OAuth, and click on Authenticate your GitHub account or select the Personal Access Token option. Next, specify the list of GitHub repositories. To ease this process, you can utilize the setup guide on the right side of the source page.

• You can optionally fill in the Start date from which you would like to replicate the data and set the Max Waiting Time in minutes for the rate limit.
• Once all the required fields are specified, click on the Set up source button.

Step 3: Configure BigQuery as Your Destination

After configuring your GitHub source, you will need to set up BigQuery as the destination for your data. Before you begin, the following prerequisites should met:

• Ensure you have Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Active billing should be enabled for your GCP account.
• Create a BigQuery project in Google Cloud Console and set up datasets.

Now, follow the steps to finish the destination configuration:

• Choose the Destination option from Airbyte’s homepage.
• Browse for BigQuery and select the available connector.

• On the destination configuration page, go to the Connection section and specify the Project ID, Dataset Location, and Default Dataset ID of your BigQuery project. Then, choose either Batched Standard Inserts or GCS Staging as the loading method (We recommend using the GCS staging method). You can refer to the setup guide on the right side of the destination page.

• Click on the Set up destination button.

Step 4: Set Up Your First Sync

After your source and destination are defined, set up your first sync using the following steps:

• Click on the Connection option and choose Select an existing source.

• Select GitHub as your source and BigQuery as your destination.

• Finally, choose the streams that you wish to sync.

Step 5: Connection Overview

Once you set up the first sync, you will be taken to a connection overview page with the following tabs:

• Status Tab: It provides an overview of your connector’s sync health.‍
• Job History Tab: It allows you to verify the logs for each sync. If you find any unexpected errors during a sync, it would be better to check the logs as the first step to identify the cause and solution.
• ‍Schema Tab: It enables you to modify the streams you select during the connection setup.
• ‍Transformation Tab: It helps you to configure custom post-sync transformations using dbt.
• ‍Settings Tab: It enables you to configure the connection settings or delete the connection if you do not want to use it further.

Once you have finished all these steps, you can check that the sync has been completed by verifying the data in your target system. 

Conclusion

Low-code workflow automation is revolutionizing how you approach application development and process management. By minimizing the need for deep coding, these platforms help IT professionals and citizen developers to create, deploy, and automate workflows quickly. Whether you are in the pharmaceutical industry, education, or another sector, low-code tools offer the flexibility to adjust to evolving organizational demands.

When you integrate low-code automation into your operations, it is essential to select a platform that suits your business goals and technological needs. The right tool can help streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve productivity.

FAQs

Is RPA considered low-code?

No, RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is not considered low-code. Both RPA and low-code platforms help streamline processes. However, RPA is specifically designed for automating repetitive, rule-based tasks, whereas low-code platforms focus on simplifying application development and workflow automation without extensive coding.

What are the four main benefits of low-code automation?

Ease of use, reduced development time and cost, increased productivity, and improved agility are the four main benefits of low-code automation.

What is no-code process automation?

No-code process automation allows you to automate processes without writing a single line of code. It offers intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built templates, making it accessible to users with zero coding knowledge.

What is low-code workflow automation?

Low-code workflow automation is a process of creating, deploying, and automating workflows with minimal hand-coding. It involves using visual tools, similar to no-code platforms, to simplify the development process with basic programming skills.