In today’s hyper-competitive world, enterprises need agility and flexibility to modify their businesses processes quickly to remain relevant. In the past, large enterprises have hindered process agility by locking themselves into disparate systems, processes, and workflows.

The result of this is the creation of data silos, lots of copy and paste, repetition, lost data, wasted resources, and ultimately, inefficient working processes. All of a sudden, using technology becomes the job instead of it being a valuable tool to streamline job processes.

In the world of business, this truly matters. It will lead to your employees having to play catch-up, ensuring the data is the same across multiple repositories. And this is likely to lead to them forgetting something, or perhaps, even more concerning, leading them to loathe their jobs completely.

Digital process automation (DPA) solutions help to unite these different systems, allowing IT and business teams to collaborate on end-to-end applications to transform and optimize processes. With such systems, businesses are empowered to achieve higher productivity by automating repetitive elements present in regular workflows, increase customer satisfaction by streamlining operations and thus improving product quality, and more.

There are many DPA suites available on the market, each coming with its own unique strength and weaknesses. But a common weakness found in many of these solutions is the lack of agility.

A combination of highly-skilled developers and a significant amount of time coding is typically required to build and customize business applications. However, by the time an application is delivered, the business process may have changed. This may require the application to be tweaked, involving many more months of development time. The unfortunate result for businesses is outdated and inflexible applications.

Source: K2

With the rapid pace of modernization and the expectations of customers on the rise, organizations have no choice but to source a DPA solution that is both fast and smart. In order to meet the demands of today’s customers, modern DPA software is embracing low-code. Low-code is a new method of software development defined by minimal coding. It’s a fast automation method which enables even the most amateur of techies to rapidly build and deploy applications that are customized to current business needs.

With low-code DPA software (and some “traditional” BPM – business process management – systems), you can perform tasks which would have previously required code – such as making connections to external applications – with drag-and-drop elements or built-in features.

These DPA/BPM applications have enabled the rise of what Gartner calls “citizen developers”: end-users who create software outside of a development team. According to a recent survey, three-fourths of organizations report that at least some of their applications are developed by employees outside the IT department.

An early adopter and disrupter in the low-code DPA space is K2. Its cloud-based process automation platform gives companies the power to create modern process applications, automate workflows, and transform their business. With this platform, your enterprise can become faster and more responsive to the evolving demands of the customer.

Build

Without the need for a computer science degree, you can build compelling, modern applications that simplify and streamline workflows quickly. Users can develop using a simple drag-and-drop interface with minimal code. Design tailored applications, from lightweight solutions to mission-critical, that fit your specific business needs and tie in with any line-of-business system: all with just a few clicks.

With this easy-to-use platform, automate processes once and then extend access to users across the company. Citizen developers can access customized templates to enable the rapid creation of common applications. According to Forrester’s TEI report, the K2 platform reduces development time by 78 percent.

Empower

This platform empowers business owners and maximizes IT resources with its visual design and optimization features. Users and teams outside the dedicated developer team are empowered to address their own workflow challenges through self-service capabilities.

This means that your business can free up “traditional” development resources in order to focus on high-value business needs. Using a compelling, user-friendly interface, workflows can be automated using a drag-and-drop designer, and custom reports and analytics can be created seamlessly — without requiring costly IT intervention.

Source: K2

The simplicity of K2’s tools empowers companies with small IT teams to support more applications with fewer resources. For instance, the K2 platform enabled the Israeli Courts to build processes that empower inexperienced employees to process new cases consistently and with the same efficiency as more experienced staff.

Control

With this next-generation cloud-based solution, businesses can take the reins of their processes and workflows with improved visibility and security.

Applications can easily be shared across the enterprise while maintaining control over users and data security. For instance, the solution allows you to delegate access via role-based permissions. As such, you can deploy the platform enterprise-wide with full confidence that only authorized users will have visibility into process data.

By being able to manage your processes and applications centrally, you can extend better visibility and governance across your entire workflow. Gain greater visibility over your workflows with access to information such as the status of a task, including who is assigned to it, how long it’s been waiting for action, the response given, and more.

With all information provided through one centralized platform, the management of processes and tasks is made easy, helping managers keep processes running smoothly. With access to valuable data and analytics, your business can make smarter decisions; from free built-in process reports to integration with third-party visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI.

Japanese video game developer, Square Enix, uses K2 to handle its game-mastering approval process, which requires a top-secret level of security. Improved visibility and audit trails ensure that only authorized recipients receive game copies during the weeks leading up to a worldwide game release.

If you want to find out more about how to transform your business with a low-code process automation platform, get in touch with a K2 representative today.