Value through digital transformation

Mergers and acquisitions can present your business with a wealth of opportunities. However, it can also present significant hurdles that will hinder your growth if they go unchecked. Many companies looking to take a digital transformation journey struggle to know where to begin, and even those with a solid strategy can lack the technical resources to execute it. That’s why we’ve put together this short guide based on our experiences working with enterprise organisations through mergers to help your business thrive through digital transformation.

Legacy modernisation

Legacy systems refer to an old technology, system or application program that is out of date. Legacy Systems often fail to keep pace with the benefits of modern technology and often require valuable resources to maintain as system as the skills and knowledge required to maintain the system are often outdated and scarce.

Outdated systems make an organisation’s workflows and process rigid and difficult to adapt and integrate with new technologies, impeding progress when business processes change, greatly impacting efficiency, and limiting growth and innovation.

Through Low-Code development you can solve many of these complex challenges through a drag-and-drop toolkit, creating new applications, data layers, and portals, that amalgamate services, much faster than through traditional coding methods. Low-Code development platforms such as OutSystems offer the flexibility to adapt capabilities based on your business goals, meaning that as the industry changes and grows and user priorities change so can your technology, allowing you to build for the future.

Data Consolidation

As enterprise businesses grow, they inherit the technical platforms from additional businesses they acquire resulting in complex architecture with multiple database instances, hosting arrangements and older SOAP APIs that are increasingly challenging to integrate with.

During a merger or acquisition, data migration is a major challenge for the companies involved. It’s essential that data is managed and consolidated correctly to create streamlined workflows and sustainable structures.

High-Performance Low-Code development has emerged as a dark horse in this space. It can help you reduce inefficiencies, and duplication, by integrating data and delivering value via unified business information. Streamlining processes and creating a single source of truth to enable simplified integration of services while maintaining the seamless front-end interface.

Rapid application development

When combining platforms, a huge challenge for even advanced developers is how to get two different back-end systems communicating with each other and presenting that data to their end users in a seamless interface. For enterprise organisations with a monolithic tech stack and traditional coding methods, a project like this would take months, if not years to complete. While the development teams are hard at work integrating the systems, they’re too busy to prioritise innovation, often falling behind their competitors and damaging the market share which could be the key reason for the merger in the first place.

There is a need for a more dynamic method of application development, and this can be achieved through High-Performance Low-Code. Low-Code empowers enterprise organisations by:

• • Delivering functional applications and POCs in weeks rather than months.

  • Optimising your digital business operations.

  • Improving customer and employee engagement.

  • Providing the ability to easily connect to essential data.

  • Adapting and updating your applications as quickly as business imperatives shift.

  • Adding new capabilities as they become available to your applications.

  • Dragging and dropping new features delivering functionality with minimal effort

  • Downloading popular pre-built components, applications, and connectors from the OutSystems Low-Code

Automate/Streamline processes

A common pain point that organisations often overlook is inefficient processes, and most organisations have some. Over recent years, we have seen that there has been a sharp rise in organisations requesting access to advanced planning and scheduling applications. Enterprise teams are looking to replace formerly manual systems with simple productivity apps. Some of our most requested process automation applications include employee onboarding and performance systems, timesheet management, and travel requests.

These processes need to be managed with the right level of governance and technical consideration. Unipro’s Low-Code solutions allow enterprise teams to quickly create micro-services and applications which integrate with their current IT stack, empowering them to do more in less time.

With this new approach to development comes many benefits:

• • Time savings: Low-Code allows users to build their own customised apps without the need to a highly skilled and scarce development team.

  • Cost savings: Low-Code reduces the amount of time spent on developing new solutions by up to 95%. It also reduces the lifetime cost of maintenance and support.

  • Productivity gains: Low-Code allows developers to rapidly build the solution they need.

Web optimised UX

No two businesses are the same. Whilst merging two back-end systems may sound complex, it’s imperative that user experience is not compromised. Customer satisfaction and retention are the key to business growth after all. That’s not to say experiences can’t be improved.

Organisations with a wealth of customer insights invest heavily in the personalisation of features, establishing a refined user journey to serve their customer base. Low-Code empowers you to quickly build and deploy user-centric services. Easily connect to any system, automate processes, and harness data in real time to deliver a consistent and personalised digital customer experience.

Unipro are experts in analysing technical architecture and identifying best practices to create a bespoke platform to reach business-critical goals and enhance the user experience by utilising the OutSystems Platform integrated development environment which provides a complete, end-to-end scenario for the lifecycle of business apps, processes, or services.

Team augmentation

Currently, the UK technology sector is being hit with a talent shortage, inhibiting growth within the sector. Many companies are already feeling the strain when it comes to hiring essential skilled workers. According to the BBC, “There were more than two million UK job vacancies in tech last year, more than any other labour area, but an industry coalition says nearly 12 million workers lack essential digital skills.”

This brings no surprise that when organisations are faced with a large technical challenge, such as the complex integrations of two widely different systems, this challenge becomes amplified.

Fortunately, there are solutions available that make creating digital transformation easier than ever before, and they don't require you to hire a developer.

OutSystems and Unipro offer training for developers in the form of courses, boot camps, samples, guides, demos, and documentation - all of which support your team in building high-quality mobile and web applications in Low-Code.

We also offer three different types of augmented resources:

1. 1. Full Unipro team: We'll handle all aspects of project design, build and delivery with our experienced Low-Code team

   2. Blend your team with ours: Build an internal team and utilise any combination of our Strategists, UX Designers and Tech Leads to help steer your first projects in the right direction.

   3. Supplement your team with key Unipro subject matter experts: We embed our experts into your team, ensuring you get the maximum value from our knowledge and experience.

We have guided learning paths for all positions, from complete beginners to those with extensive expertise who want to take their talents to the next level. We'll provide a bespoke training plan that will transform your already knowledgeable team into masters of Low-Code.