Business as usual isn’t a safe bet anymore.
To survive against an evolving backdrop of tech changes and new competition, you have to separate yourself from the “this is how we do it” mentality and reimagine your company’s workflows and processes.
Two of the best ways to do so are with process automation and application development.
“We’re looking at the current state and the future of the way people work,” says Jackson Alexander, Product Manager at Nintex. “Process automation and app development cover two different but very important pieces—the way work gets done and how it can be done more efficiently.”
Together, process automation and app development are even more powerful—working together to improve your company’s efficiency and revenue and letting you adapt to change with agility.
To make the most of both capabilities, you’ll need to know:
- What app dev and process automation are and how they overlap
- When you need one or the other—and when you need both
- How much value you get from each
- How to get started
App dev: What it is and why it matters
Application development, also known as app dev, is the creation of software programs to accomplish business tasks. Developers plan, design, code, test, and deploy these programs, which run on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets or on desktop.
Companies often turn to app dev when they have unique needs that require an app that doesn’t yet exist. In these cases, they might create their own through an in-house development team, freelance developers, or a no-code or low-code solution platform.
You might need an internal app when you want to:
- Simplify the data entry process, so your employees can enter numbers into form fields instead of a massive spreadsheet
- Allow workers to log and store their time spent on projects
- Calculate your monthly marketing expenses
- Create customized dashboards for your sales data
Developing an internal app with a no-code or low-code solution packs a double punch: there’s value in both the building process and the app itself.
“I put app dev’s value into two categories,” Alexander says. “One of those is the value in how the dev work gets done—it democratizes the number of people who can do the work, which affects how quickly it can get done and how easily it can be managed and deployed. And then there’s the value of what you’ve built. You now have a solution your team wants to adopt and use that you can update easily and get results. So you should ideally see value in decreased time to value.”
For example, a mid-sized medical claims provider turned to OpenGate Consulting for solutions to improve its data entry process. The claims provider’s manual approach took too much time and effort and had a high rate of inaccuracies, which then needed to be reconciled. OpenGate used Nintex to create a medical claims app that simplified the data entry process—fulfilling 100% of the service provider’s needs within five months and reducing processing time by 67%.
“App dev is often a superpower for underresourced teams or teams of one.”
—Jackson Alexander, Product Manager, Nintex
Process automation: What it is and why it matters
Process automation is the use of software and technology to optimize business processes and streamline business operations. It integrates AI and robotics to automate workflows, freeing up company resources and reducing human error in repetitive tasks.
Process automation has diverse use cases across business functions. Your organization might use it to:
- Manufacture a product
- Process invoices
- Route contracts for approvals
- Onboard new employees
- Provide better customer service
- Simplify loan processing and the quote-to-cash process
- Improve email personalization, scheduling, and follow-ups
- Compile and submit regulatory reports to ensure compliance
In cases like these, process automation adds value by helping you achieve continuous improvement with less manual effort. When used effectively, automation can dramatically improve your cost efficiency, productivity, risk management and compliance, product quality, and customer and employee satisfaction.
The result is that your employees spend less time and energy on mundane, repetitive tasks—and more time prioritizing action items or value-add activities.
For example, Canadian company Wawanesa Insurance wanted to improve its member experience. Through process discovery and robotic process automation (RPA) with Nintex, it found it could reduce manual and repetitive tasks for its brokers and employees, freeing them up to deliver more value to members. The organization saved 15,000+ full-time employee hours and cut $1.05 million in costs.
Process automation plus app development: The power of compounding processes
You can use process automation and app dev separately to see big changes in your business operations. But when used together—either separately or concurrently within a workflow—the impact is even more powerful.
App dev lets you create custom apps for people to do their work. These apps create a manual interface, often requiring synchronous input. Someone opens a portal or a form and enters information as they move through a process.
Process automation lets you complete parts of that process behind the scenes, often asynchronously. For example, after entering information into form fields and hitting submit, a program automatically triggers the approval process or sends a notification to managers to review.
“When you combine the two, you can build a custom application that matches the way your business works synchronously in its operations,” Alexander says. “What’s happening asynchronously can trigger an automation behind the scenes, and then update the custom application where people work. Then, you’ve got the power of both coming together—a more efficient operational process that’s done by people through the user interface.”
Essentially, having both app dev and process automation in your toolbelt provides you with customization and efficiency, improving the way your business operates.
It also gives you options. You can create apps that have process automation built in—and you can use process automation to speed up the development process for your app dev.
“There are ways with either custom apps, or workflow automation, or a combination of the two, to take a manual, paper, or legacy software process and modernize it for relatively low cost and in a short amount of time.”
–Jackson Alexander, Product Manager, Nintex
How process automation and app dev streamline operations and help you scale
Say your midmarket apparel company wants to improve its inventory management. With an app dev platform, you develop a custom inventory management app. The program gives warehouse workers an easy user interface for inputting stock updates—and gives you visibility into real-time product availability and stock levels across warehouses.
Then, based on insights from the app, you further streamline operations through process automation. You create and deploy an automated replenishment workflow that integrates with your app to generate purchase orders for replenishing items.
In the end, you have a higher-value solution that’s more democratized, easier to update, and easier to manage. And because you create and control the app and the automation, you can scale out as much as you need to.
Pro tip: Use the Nintex Platform as an all-in-one source for building and integrating your app dev and process automation. With Nintex, you can easily create an app without writing a single line of code by adding pages, connecting data, and dragging and dropping components onto a canvas. And with the same platform, you can build and automate workflows that make life easier for your team members and deliver more quality products and services to customers.
How to get started with process automation and app dev
Reaping the benefits of process automation and app dev sounds great, right? But if you’re an organization running on paper processes or legacy systems, digital transformation might feel like a pipe dream. You likely lack the teams you need to tackle this or the resources to pay a third party to lead the way.
But it’s absolutely still possible to change the way you do business and see your efficiency improve. Here’s a three-step approach to get started with process automation and app dev—without getting overwhelmed.
Step 1: Identify your top priority problem
Talk to your line of business or technical lead. They can likely tell you off-hand what the number one problem is within their team or function. Ask, “If you could wave a magic wand and fix one problem about the way your team works or how a process runs, what would it be?”
Try not to overthink it—or you risk not getting started at all. This is a starting point. It should align with overarching business objectives, but other than that, you have flexibility here.
For example, say your sales team struggles to collect data points for customer service. This is a problem because it’s wasting your reps’ time, prolonging the sales cycle, and hampering your company’s vision for a better end-to-end customer experience.
Step 2: Identify an approach to solve that problem
Once you’ve settled on a problem to solve, you need to find a way to fix it. Remember, you’re just focusing on improving this one thing—not every single issue within your company.
This is where app dev and process automation come into play. Depending on your issue, you can start with one or the other. For example, in the case of the sales team above, you might create an app first that allows you to enter specific data points, and then send that information automatically to customer service.
Or, if you’re starting from ground zero, you could look for a way to digitize a single paper form. Once it’s digitized, it’s easy to automate—sending notifications that it’s ready to complete or routing it for eSignatures. And then you could develop an app to make it easier for employees to complete the form in the first place.
Step 3: Build your first solution
Your first wins with process automation and app dev serve as fuel for continued growth.
Alexander says he sees three different “aha moments” that occur at this point:
- You think of another problem you have that this technology can solve
- You recognize how to apply this technology to an issue your team or boss has
- You feel empowered to solve issues across functions
Now, you can optimize almost any process your company has, and you really see the effects of investment in process improvements and app dev payoff. Because it’s a gradual process—a snowball effect of lightbulb moments or wins—it doesn’t feel like such a heavy lift.
Connect the dots between process automation and app dev
There’s no need to cobble together SaaS tools, legacy databases, and as many team members as you can spare to create a satisfying solution to your most pressing operational problems.
Instead, you can build apps that your people want to use, that connect to your processes, and that automate manual points of friction to save you time and money.
Ninex can help you do all of this quickly and efficiently, changing the way your business operates. Discover why organizations like yours choose Nintex.
