The Emerging Role of Low Code in ProcureTech

An industrial cycle rarely acts like a cyclone but as a continuous stream of improvement ripples of different sizes caused by major breakthroughs in technology and energy access.

If you are a ProcureTech geek like us in HICX you will enjoy the excellent and timely article by Matthew Deem, Mondelez’ Digital Transformation Lead, a couple of months ago, which was highlighting an important technology ‘ripple’ that is occurring right now in Software and how this is changing the traditional ways of looking at technology investments.

In short, Matthew’s article highlight that alternatives have emerged to the classic Make/Buy consideration to software investments.

One is software Customization, which has been around for some time, and typically involves writing new code to a bought software application to make it better fit your need and environment. But this approach is often expensive and can lead to high technical debts which often locks the customer in for the long term in order to pay this debt off. And in today’s rapid digital innovation environment, a significant risk factor is also that the market develops new and better solutions faster than your custom solution can keep up, leaving you with a competitive disadvantage.

The emerging ‘ripple’ Matthew is referring to is Low Code. It is delivering enterprise-class applications with little or no hard-coding and with the principal benefits being unmatched configurability and flexibility compared to standard hard coded Enterprise Software applications.

Although Low Code is emerging below the awareness of most folks “it has become an extraordinarily disruptive page in the enterprise digital story” according to Jason Bloomberg, a renowned expert and author on disruptive trends in enterprise technology and digital transformation.

Gartner and Forrester already have magic quadrants for Low Code players but they show little presence in the ProcureTech space. This space is still dominated by hard coded applications that require the customer to more align to how the software is engineered vs the software aligning to how the customer needs it to work to maximize the desired benefits.

Don’t get me wrong, hard coded applications can be a blessing. For instance, for very transactional processes it is desirable with standard solutions. Lots of companies also feel something very out of the box can help them simplify their processes and ‘sort of their mess’ and don’t even want options to tailor things too much.

But for a fast growing segment of large to very large Enterprises configurability is becoming a key factor in vendor selection (followed by user experience and integration capabilities). We at HICX, being a low code platform ourselves, started feeling this strongly back in 2018 which accelerated further into 2019 where we experienced a significant hike in demand with $10bn+ manufacturing organizations. Common traits among the very large enterprises are high levels of business complexity, global manufacturing and customer foot prints, often a messy ERP and ProcureTech landscape and de-centralized data.

As with smaller and less complex companies, the very large Enterprises also want to achieve global governance and process harmonization, such as in supplier master data and information management, and it is in this context that Low Code rapidly is becoming a favored choice. This is a natural cycle driven by large organizations having tried to fit into hard coded applications but failed, often multiple times over, resulting in a lot of frustration and time and money wasted.

For the growing number of Millennials, and younger generations, taking up work in large corporations, their first meeting with Enterprise Software and business processes, is a shock and a far cry from the B2C applications they are used to in their personal life.

Low Code promises not only to enable enterprises to operate more as aligned, flexible and connected entities but to make work itself more efficient and fun. This latter point will be particularly important in times where big businesses have to compete harder than ever before against cooler, smaller and more agile technology companies and startups.

Wishing friends, colleagues and my network at large a great start to the new decade, which is predicted to become the most technology disruptive of humankind thus far. How exciting!