9 Tips for Efficient Low Code Workflow Automation

Consider you finally finish writing your big report, only to learn that the document doesn’t follow the new organizational structure your team adopted last month. Your stomach sinks as you imagine the hours you’ll have to reformat your carefully crafted text. As if producing this document wasn’t stressful enough, you’ll have to figure out how to make it fit within a new structure before your manager’s deadline. 

The stress of work is easier to manage when you have the right tools at your disposal. AI workflow management can help you get organized and automate tedious tasks so you can focus on what matters most. One of the most effective ways to leverage AI for workflow management is through low-code workflow automation. This guide will explore how low code workflow automation works, its benefits, and how to get started with automation to enhance your productivity.

One tool that can help you get organized and produce your report with greater efficiency is Otio’s AI research and writing partner. This low code workflow automation solution can help you manage your writing project, automate the research process, and even generate content so you can meet your deadlines with less stress. 

Table Of Contents

• Low Code Workflow Automation Benefits

• Examples of Low Code Workflow Automation

• 9 Tips for Efficient Low Code Workflow Automation

• 10 Best Low Code Workflow Automation Tools

• Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today

Low Code Workflow Automation Benefits

Low code workflow automation simplifies life for all users, especially those who aren’t IT professionals. With a low-code platform, you don’t have to be a developer to create and manage automations. The intuitive design of low-code solutions means anyone can use them.

Drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-built templates, and one-click deployment make starting easy. Before long, users can create custom automations that meet their unique business needs. According to G2, 70% of low-code users with no prior coding experience learned how to use a low-code platform in one month or less.  

Empower Citizen Developers and Reduce Bottlenecks 

Low code workflow automation empowers business users to become citizen developers. Your team can build and manage automations to improve processes without waiting for IT. According to a Gartner report, 61% of organizations either have or plan to have active citizen development initiatives. 

As organizations ramp up their digital transformation plans to keep up with competitors, IT teams have been pressured to deliver new business applications. The advantage of low code is that employees outside of the IT department can now help them meet this challenge of keeping up with new developments by sharing the burden.  

Deploy New Applications and Automations at Record Speed 

Traditional software development can take weeks or months to complete. With low code automation platforms, users can rapidly prototype, iterate, and deploy applications in a fraction of the time. This speed is crucial for businesses seeking to capitalize on market opportunities. 

Forrester reports that the current usage of low-code platforms indicates that software development can be propelled to 10 times the speed of traditional processes. The benefit of speed continues past the initial deployment phase as if changes are required, and it is quick and easy to update processes.  

Improve Business Agility to Keep Up With Market Changes 

The simple approach of building and amending processes means you can make agile changes to processes without having to worry about changing complex code. This helps to keep up with regulatory changes, adapt to market changes, or respond to customer needs. This agility will continue to prove its benefits in the years to come as businesses adjust their processes and applications to keep up with evolving marketplaces.  

Ensure Compliance and Best Practices in Workflow Automations 

The agility that comes with low code platforms is instrumental in keeping up with ever-changing rules and regulations, particularly in highly regulated industries such as finance and manufacturing. Documenting and automating workflows using a low-code platform is the ideal way to ensure that specific requirements are met and that operations can be agile enough to evolve when regulations change. 

Additionally, templates play a significant role in low code automation, with many applications originating from process templates. So, providing templates that adhere to best practices for users to follow when building and automating processes means they will be created in a compliant manner.  

Integrate Easily with Existing Systems and Applications 

Thanks to the wide availability of connectors, widgets, and APIs, low-code platforms can easily integrate with legacy systems already in place within an organization’s infrastructure. Low-code platforms can act as an integration layer between applications, so your users have a centralized platform to access information that is held in different silos across the organization. Connecting your silos and systems across the organization can help to provide better customer service, as all data is centralized and visible, and helps to ensure operational efficiency and compliance through visibility and connectivity.  

Save Money on Development Costs 

Cost savings can be seen in various aspects of low-code platforms. Costs can be saved on initial training, and money doesn’t need to be spent on hiring skilled developers who demand a high salary. Additional cost savings can also be seen from the faster time to market, being able to do more in less time, and producing a solid ROI.

Examples of Low Code Workflow Automation

1. Enhancing Business Process Management 

One of the most prevalent low-code applications is optimizing business processes and improving workflows to boost productivity and collaboration between and within teams significantly. From standardizing support requests to integrating new application functionality and creating defined workflows for executing new projects, low-code software empowers teams to develop the unique solutions they need and perform at their full potential. A real-world example is Captive Resources, one of America's largest alternative insurance firms. 

2. Improving Small Business Transactional Systems

Another typical low-code use case is improving small businesses' transactional systems. This enhances the end-user or customer experience by plugging in gaps in their delivery process, making fulfilling orders, and completing business transactions seamless and more satisfactory for both the team and customers. 

3. Generating APIs and Integrating Platforms

Using low-code automation tools reduces IT and DevOps workload significantly. With the visual development environments and drag-and-drop interfaces of low-code platforms, citizen developers can generate APIs and connect work applications, creating a more synchronized and replicable workflow to make the most of the organization's resources, including human resources, time, and money. Integrating work applications also provides better data sources and analytics that help improve business processes and performance, creating a continuous improvement loop. 

4. Streamlining and Automating Workflows

Formerly, only the IT team and professional developers could handle streamlining and automating enterprise workflows. Now, every technical user can easily automate workflows with low-code automation platforms offering various solutions for organizations in different lifecycle phases. Low-code solutions range from sophisticated solutions to simple assignments. For example, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps enterprise IT teams reach into multiple databases, information systems, and data sources to perform specific tasks on a schedule. 

Low-code tools, on the other hand, are more straightforward solutions that serve as connectors between two work applications or tasks. As another example, you may create a spreadsheet that automatically updates when a visitor to your website completes a contact form. Programming simple rules like "If this, then that" for simple decision-making and assigning work to team members allows citizen developers to eliminate low-value tasks and focus on value-adding tasks.

5. Empowering Non-Technical Employees

Low-code automation: happy programmer. Low-code software empowers non-technical employees by using programming power to create solutions to their business problems. Non-technical staff can quickly become outstanding citizen developers, freeing up the IT team's workload to innovate and secure the organization’s systems. 

Business users can elevate team and user experience by developing beautiful web and mobile applications that streamline or add value to the business process or product. Low-code application platforms also help different departments improve their work systems. Marketers, for example, can easily automate marketing activities such as website personalization, email marketing, search engine optimization, and social media scheduling. 

6. Modernizing Legacy Systems

As technology accelerates, most big companies face the problem of obsolete legacy systems still powering most of their operations and output. IT departments and teams can leverage available low-code applications to modernize their legacy systems, one bit at a time, while keeping operations running smoothly as usual. 

7. Creating Industry-Standard UI Design

Low-code applications help to embed industry-standard UI design into your digital products and applications. Citizen developers can easily drag and drop the modules they need, maintaining a clean look and standard UI until a concept is created. Different low-code tools offer various layouts and UI elements, allowing you to quickly build web or mobile solutions with industry-standard UI and UX design. 

8. Establishing Containerization

Containerization means a situation where specific applications are run in isolated user spaces called containers. Each application runs separately in a container, although they all use a shared operating system. This helps avoid accumulating technical debt or shadow IT risk over risk as more business users create new applications that may not be compatible with other software the organization uses. 

Containerization helps separate the ad-hoc systems citizen developers create from the primary operating system of the entire organization. This allows the IT department to review, improve, and update low-code solutions built by citizen developers before merging them with the organization's central system. 

9. Expanding Current Services

In catering to current customers, some businesses discover a tangential product or service for which their customers use their solutions. This is an excellent way to find out what services your customers are looking for, improve your product, or tack on a new solution to your current offerings. Low-code tools provide a double advantage, from gathering and analyzing customer data to building the applications and product features your customers want based on earlier data. 

Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today

Today, knowledge workers, researchers, and students suffer from content overload and are left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Too many settle for stitching together complicated bookmarking, read-it-later, and note-taking apps to get through their workflows. Now that anyone can create content with a button, this problem will only worsen. Otio solves this problem by providing researchers with one AI-native workspace. It helps them: 

• Collect many data sources, from bookmarks, tweets, and extensive books to YouTube videos. 

• Extract key takeaways with detailed AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. 

• Create draft outputs using the sources you’ve collected. Otio helps you to go from the reading list to the first draft faster. 

Along with this, Otio also helps you write research papers/essays faster. Here are our top features that researchers love: AI-generated notes on all bookmarks (Youtube videos, PDFs, articles, etc.), Otio enables you to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases, just like you chat with ChatGPT, as well as AI-assisted writing. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!

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9 Tips for Efficient Low Code Workflow Automation

1. Embrace Otio for Efficient Workflow Automation

Today, knowledge workers, researchers, and students suffer from content overload and are left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Too many settle for stitching together complicated bookmarking, read-it-later, and note-taking apps to get through their workflows. Now that anyone can create content with a button, this problem will only worsen. Otio solves this problem by providing researchers with one AI-native workspace. It helps them: 

• Collect many data sources, from bookmarks, tweets, and extensive books to YouTube videos. 

• Extract key takeaways with detailed AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. 

• Create draft outputs using the sources you’ve collected. Otio helps you to go from the reading list to the first draft faster. 

Along with this, Otio also helps you write research papers/essays faster. Here are our top features that researchers love: AI-generated notes on all bookmarks (Youtube videos, PDFs, articles, etc.), Otio enables you to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases, just like you chat with ChatGPT, as well as AI-assisted writing. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!

2. Utilize Visual Development Tools

Low-code platforms help you create visually automated workflows using drag-and-drop development tools. This visual approach simplifies the creation of complex processes and reduces development time. 

3. Take Advantage of Pre-Built Components

Low-code platforms have numerous templates and widgets to help you build applications faster. Using these pre-built components can accelerate development and ensure consistency across applications.

4. Integrate with Existing Systems

Before committing to a low-code platform, ensure it seamlessly connects with your current systems, databases, and third-party applications. This integration capability is crucial for maintaining data consistency and streamlining operations.

5. Automate Routine Tasks

Identify repetitive tasks within your workflows and automate them using the platform's features. Automation reduces the likelihood of human error and frees up time for more strategic activities.

6. Customize When Necessary

While pre-built components are helpful, don't hesitate to add custom code to meet specific business requirements. This flexibility ensures that the automated workflows align perfectly with your organization's needs. 

7. Implement Role-Based Access Control

Establish clear ownership and permissions within your workflows. Role-based access control ensures that only authorized personnel can access or modify certain parts of the workflow, enhancing security and accountability. 

8. Monitor and Optimize Workflows

Continuously track the performance of your automated workflows. Use the platform's monitoring and reporting features to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies and adjust for optimal performance. 

9. Foster Collaboration Between Teams

Encourage collaboration between IT and business teams during the development and implementation of workflows. This collaborative approach ensures that the automated 

10 Best Low Code Workflow Automation Tools

1. Otio: The Future of AI Research and Writing

Otio helps researchers and knowledge workers manage the overwhelming productivity challenge of content overload by providing them with an AI-native workspace.  The tool allows users to collect various data sources, extract key takeaways with AI-generated notes, and create draft outputs using their collected sources. With Otio, researchers go from the reading list to the first draft faster. Top features include AI-generated notes on all bookmarks, the ability to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases for research, and web scraping capabilities for accessing diverse information beyond traditional academic papers and search engines. Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!

2. Zoho Creator: Low-Code for Small Business

Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use, low-code development platform with a minimalist design, strong pre-built apps, and field selection. While it requires a proprietary scripting language to unlock its full customization and automation power, Creator is an affordable, user-friendly choice for SMBs investing in a business app creation tool. 

Pros

• Simple, straightforward interface

• Easy-to-use form builder

• Affordable

• Apps responsively resize for mobile

Cons

• Requires use of proprietary scripting language for app customization and automation

• Mobile app development and pre-built template selection aren't as advanced as in some other tools

3. PowerApps: Microsoft’s Low-Code Powerhouse

Microsoft PowerApps is a formidable entry in the low-code development space. This product is initially intimidating, but its power makes it an easy pick for our Editors' Choice designation in this category. 

Pros

• Robust feature set

• Extensive number of integrations

• A wide array of user interface (UI) options and templates

• Powerful mobile functionality

Cons

• Easy to use, considering the power available

• Load times could be better

• UI can be overwhelming at first

4. OutSystems: Enterprise-Grade Low-Code

OutSystems is a powerful, feature-packed, low-code development platform for large enterprises or developers looking to publish straight to consumer app stores. This mature, well-designed tool builds good-looking apps and handles the entire software development lifecycle. 

Pros

• Tailored and guided low-code app creation experience based on role and skill level

• One-click deployment and rollback

• Great free plan for SMBs

• Offline data storage

Cons

• Enterprise plans aren't cheap

• Desktop IDE only; no fully cloud-based app creation environment

5. Quick Base: Good All-Around Low-Code

Quick Base is an easy-to-use low-code development platform with a comprehensive feature set and the fastest form-based wizard we tested for basic app creation. 

Pros

• Very fast basic app creation

• Straightforward wizard-based app building

• Form-based interface for workflow automation with no coding required

• Strong prebuilt app marketplace and third-party integrations

Cons

• Somewhat dated user interface (UI)

• No native mobile app

6. Salesforce App Cloud: The Most Powerful Low-Code Tool

Salesforce App Cloud is the most potent low-code development platform on the market, with a visual toolset and third-party ecosystem that can't be matched. Still, its cluttered and confusing UI and messy tutorials hold it back from unifying the sum of its impressive parts into a cohesive app creation process. 

Pros

• Extensive AppExchange marketplace of pre-built apps and components

• Reusable objects and elements in Lightning App Builder

• Drag-and-drop Process Builder and Schema Builder for creating complex automated logic

• Best-in-class mobile and tablet app design capabilities

Cons

• Cluttered interface with an overwhelming array of features

• Confusing to navigate

7. Nintex: Best for Workflow Automation

Nintex Workflow Cloud has arguably the best visual workflow editing and automated logic environment of all the low-code development platforms we've tested. Still, its basic app UI design and database capabilities need deeper integration and improvement. 

Pros

• Drag-and-drop workflow editing

• Superb workflow automated and logic rule creation

• Built-in task assignment and management

• Strong integrations

• Native Nintex Mobile app

Cons

• App creation environment not integrated into the whole experience 

• Database options are limited

8. TrackVia: Streamlined Low-Code for Enterprises

TrackVia is a simply designed and easy-to-use low-code development platform for enterprises. 

Pros

• Clean user interface (UI)

• Native mobile app and responsive dashboards

• Intuitive form builders and drag-and-drop capabilities

• Zapier integration 

Cons

• There is no entry-level tier, so SMBs are priced out

• Default layouts can limit customization

9. Google App Maker: Good Low-Code for G Suite Users

Google App Maker is a young low-code development tool with some growing up. Still, it boasts a straightforward design, intuitive app creation process, and strong visual-oriented features to make G Suite app building a breeze for business users and developers alike. 

Pros

• User-friendly

• No coding is required for basic app creation

• Intuitive UI builder with drag-and-drop widgets

• Google Drive Tables for simple data modeling 

Cons

• Only available for G Suite Business

• No native mobile apps 

10. Mendix: End-to-End Low-Code Development

Mendix is an enterprise-grade, low-code development platform with heavy-duty project tracking, developer, and IT testing tools to tackle the entire software lifecycle. For enterprises willing to invest, Mendix is a low-code powerhouse that can do it. 

Pros

• End-to-end low-code development experience

• Extensive App Store, prebuilt templates, and integrations

• Responsive mobile and tablet previews

• Scrum built-in

Cons

• Expensive

• Steeper learning curve than some other tools

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Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today

Researchers today collect vast amounts of information to inform their work. But as they do, the data keeps piling up and can quickly become overwhelming. Even worse, the more they collect, the more complex their workflows become. Instead of helping with their research, the extra information creates an added burden. Otio alleviates this problem.  With our AI-powered research tool, you can seamlessly gather, organize, and write about your research – all in one place. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!

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