There is a lot of IT in companies. Employees want customized solutions and flexible programs. Those who focus on quality and fit break down centralized all-in-one solutions and applications and supplement them with highly specialized application systems (best-of-breed). “Thus, hundreds of applications and quite a few connections are often found in a single business unit. However, there are not a hundred IT specialists who operate, maintain and further develop these applications and interfaces,” says Stefan Ehrlich, board member of SQL Projekt AG. The pool has been exhausted. Vacant positions increased by 12 percent in 2021. Medium-sized companies have the difficulty of recruiting suitable specialist personnel. But SMEs in particular need innovations and new business models.
More speed to digital transformation
Companies can empower employees in specialist departments to develop and coordinate technology and business processes independently. Or they can give them the ability to make individual adjustments or develop new use cases even with little or no programming knowledge. Low-code technologies can do just that. Depending on their IT skills, both professional developers and pro-code developers can work to their liking without restriction, and less trained developers can create applications using simplified graphical user interfaces.
Developing solutions independently with low-code
Companies could thus provide data and process automation of medium to large scale to a wider range of employees. New digital business models emerge best when the IT department works with business departments to achieve a common goal. SQL’s low-code integration platform, Transconnect, is industry-specific to meet existing market needs. The specialized platform has the advantage that certain components and functions are predefined and these increase the speed of development, Stefan Ehrlich explains. “To this end, our teams develop ready-made graphical interfaces for industry and administration, so that even non-IT users can digitize processes with our integration platform by simply modeling them.” This allows companies to implement custom-fit IT solutions in very short cycles. They also have time for innovation and optimizing customer needs. Transconnect provides the tools to develop, execute, control and monitor the platform and business processes. Companies connect the interfaces of their applications and map any complex business processes across system, site and company boundaries – transaction-proof, fast and without major programming effort.
In a recent whitepaper, Stefan Ehrlich describes why low-code is just not just a trend and how companies can make the right platform selection. This is all the more important because if the acquired low-code platform cannot be used later for the implementation of use cases, there is a risk of a faulty investment. Go to the whitepaper by Stefan Ehrlich here!
Reducing the complexity of the IT landscape
It is simply unacceptable to maintain each application and each interface individually. The dependencies between IT systems and processes must remain visible and feasible. Transconnect connects all applications and applications at a central point. To do this, simply configure or replace the appropriate adapters, and the processes and data flows remain intact. This drastically reduces complexity. The employees in the specialist departments can use the data pots they need to develop their applications.
“This also reduces the companies’ dependence on IT service providers in terms of time and budget,” explains Ehrlich. “Since the building blocks that can be assembled via low-code modeling are used multiple times by many users for their projects, their maturity level is significantly higher than that of specifically programmed software solutions, i.e.: individual software.” This also has an impact on the overall software created via low-code development environments. The savings in test effort and time are clearly noticeable compared to individual software. This also applies to the higher software quality, which has an effect in daily use with lower support efforts.
Profile SQL Projekt AG
SQL Projekt AG (Dresden) supports its customers in accelerating and securing value creation based on data. Very early on, the SQL Projekt AG team recognized that in the digital age, the efficiency of the tools used to collect, store, process and evaluate data is of central importance to a company’s success.
So, with its Transconnect product, which has been successfully deployed on the market for over 20 years, SQL Projekt supports companies from a wide range of industries (including the manufacturing and food and beverage industries) as well as public sector institutions in automating data provision and production processes. The software is an integration platform that connects control systems for operations, processes and machines (MES, SCADA, PLC or intralogistics systems) with software systems for management and organizational processes (ERP, CRM or PLM). Transconnect is edge-capable, i.e. so compact that it can be operated on small computers directly in production, for example connected via 5G.
The product vision is a distributed network of Transconnect nodes that can be used to automate entire process chains end-to-end and provide required key figures for process optimization. Typical application areas of Transconnect include Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), business process automation – & mobilization, SAP integration, cloudification and master data management.
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Further links
👉 www.sql-ag.de
Photo: SQL Projekt AG
