Interview with Malcolm Carroll, Director of BlueFinity: ‘Using low code development tools to create apps to support business recovery’

Using low code development tools to create apps to support business recovery

A recent study from King’s Business School estimated that 6 million small businesses in the UK are in a financially precarious position because of Covid-19. Two-thirds of entrepreneurs said their business might not survive the pressures of the pandemic, while more than half predicted they would run out of money within the next 12 months. However, some companies are responding to the challenges and also to changing consumer and business behaviour, by prioritising digitalisation and the development of business apps.

The creation and timely introduction of innovative business apps can provide companies with a sound basis for economic recovery. We have seen a growing number of businesses wanting to create

apps to streamline and improve internal processes, to automate different functions and improve how they trade and interact with customers and stay competitive. One of the best ways a small businesses can develop apps without the expense of employing a team of developers is by using a low-code app development platform which allows sophisticated business apps to be created and deployed by a company’s existing personnel, who know the business better than anyone.

Using the right low-code app development platform, businesses can create apps in a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional methods. Companies will be able to use such a platform to design, develop, and deploy adaptive business apps across multiple mobile and desktop devices using their existing staff. No coding skills are required as the technology makes extensive use of ‘drag and drop’ and ‘point and click’ development techniques which ease the development process.

With the right platform, businesses should be able to develop the app once and deploy it across multiple mobile and desktop devices and desktops, as well as multiple operating systems and allow for integration with their choice of databases. The right development platform should provide businesses with the flexibility to customise apps to the company’s exact requirements, either directly through the platform or by the addition of custom code. Businesses will also be able to choose to generate their apps as web, hybrid, or native apps, from the same design base and there should be no limitations to future customisation or development possibilities.

One company that turned to BlueFinity to develop an app in lockdown is Classic Groundcovers, a wholesale nursery based in the USA that sells plants to nurseries, re-wholesalers, and contractors. They used our low-code app development system, Evoke, to create an app to digitise its manual ordering system, enabling them to handle a record volume of sales, as the pandemic forced people to stay at home and many turned to gardening.

The company said that having the app has had a ‘ground-breaking’ effect on business, as it has automated their order processing; enabling them to not only manage the surge in orders but grow the business and halve the time spent on administration. Low-code app development tools can be a real game changer for small businesses, enabling them to create apps easily and cost effectively. This helps them become more agile and innovative, responding to increased demand for apps as well as adapting to new ways of working post pandemic.