As businesses continue to grapple with ongoing economic volatility, geopolitical concerns and lingering global supply chain issues, the pressure to find ways to achieve stronger operational efficiency and cost savings has never been more crucial.
At the heart of these optimization efforts, business leaders are increasingly embracing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach, which takes into consideration all the costs associated with acquiring and operating a product or service. While conventional leaders often prioritize the upfront purchase cost of a product or service, a broader perspective known as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) considers both the initial expense and the ongoing operational costs throughout its entire lifespan.
Over the useful life of an application, there are costs associated with activities such as approving and implementing change requests, as well as providing technical support. To assess the TCO of traditional IT solutions, it is necessary to calculate the financial implications of hardware, software and operating expenses across the entire lifecycle, including the eventual decommissioning or disposal of the solution.
For supply chain decision makers, TCO is a crucial factor in decision-making, enabling them to select the most cost-effective solution that leads to long-term savings and improved performance.
In the realm of supply chain software, the adoption of low-code applications is on the rise, offering simplified development, enhanced flexibility, scalability and user experience, all contributing to a reduced TCO. These platforms empower swift creation of configured applications with minimal coding requirements. By streamlining the development process, boosting flexibility and scalability, and enriching user experience, low-code applications effectively reduce the TCO associated with supply chain software solutions.
Impact Across the Business
Low-code platforms revolutionize the development and maintenance of enterprise applications by providing a user-friendly interface that hides complex code from end users. This empowers subject matter experts, project managers, stakeholders, third-party service providers, and decision-makers to create and manage business applications without relying on IT teams.
Users can easily customize templates through simple drag-and-drop actions, eliminating the need for extensive coding knowledge. This time-saving feature allows skilled developers to focus on strategic tasks and add more value to the business. Additionally, low-code platforms offer cost savings and the ability to rapidly deploy new or upgraded applications to adapt to changing business needs. Democratizing application development in this way speeds up the process, with easy-to-use tools that anyone can understand and use also meaning reduced reliance on IT experts.
In today's dynamic business landscape, characterized by the expansion of product portfolios, different geographies, organizational restructuring and laws and regulations, software solutions—whether developed in-house or obtained from vendors—require ongoing code alterations. And, given low-code models are so easily understandable by non-IT individuals, people right across the business can work together, resulting in enhanced collaboration, which ultimately results in better outcomes. Further, at the onset, people right across the business tend to be much more involved during the development of an application. This allows any end user to provide direct feedback and even participate in the process as “citizen developers” to easily configure their applications.
Given the widespread feedback and input, applications are then much more in sync with what the business needs, which, again, can result in business efficiencies further down the line. Beyond the conception and development stage, cost savings persist throughout an application’s lifecycle, as updates and improvements, can be made quickly and easily. In today's era of digital acceleration and global challenges, businesses are actively seeking ways to achieve cost savings and streamline their operations. The low-code boom arrives at a crucial time, offering organizations a valuable solution to reduce costs, optimize their cost structure, and do more with less.
The fusion of TCO analysis and low-code solutions empowers businesses to achieve operational efficiency and cost savings in supply chain solutions. The low-code revolution democratizes development, fosters collaboration, and reduces reliance on extensive coding knowledge, ultimately shaping the future of supply chain solutions for efficiency and adaptability.
Now more than ever, supply chain leaders should realize that they need to embrace TCO and low code for a streamlined and cost-effective supply chain.
