I'm quite bullish about low-code tools now. Especially for building back office systems like ERPs or operational tools. From my experience most failures in such project implementations have been due to mismanagement in the requirement gathering phase and also development happening in silos where the team building has no real understanding of the business process workflows.
But with gpt-3.5 - these tools can really inlock the ability of non technical people to build products. Maybe outsystems should have a gpt chat interface that builds software on its platform directly from the requirements of the end user instead of any intermediate human development team.
Having used low-code tools successfully to build ERP systems for the past few years.
I feel low code tools can only really disrupt development once they solve the problem of requirements gathering from customers/ end users and also formally describe change management in low-code as well. As long as there is ambiguity in requirements - code or low code makes no difference.
This is a good point. Most comments about the rewrite in code being easier might actually be because the functional requirements from the business users have already been made clear without the ambiguity that might have arisen when developing from scratch.
Based on your experience would you be comfortable to list a few of the no-code tools to avoid when taking maintainability into account? Would be useful.
Companies in the middle east ( Saudi, Oman etc ) are required to follow very rigid localization + sponsorship rules in both ownership/legal structure as well as in employee hiring.
I am curious to know more on how to plan on automating it. Would be very valuable in the Middle east region if possible.
I was in the Uae for 5 days last week and travelling again tomorrow. For me it looks like pre-covid times - everything is open. Cricket matches in stadiums to dubai expo. They report < 100 cases per day but no one really believes those numbers to be true.
Mask wearing( atleast properly ) was maybe 40-50%. Countries like Oman with lower vaccination rates felt much safer because everyone seemed to take mask wearing much more seriously.
This is an excellent framework to validate a low-code/ full-stack frameworks as ERPs are complex beasts. I would like to also add( especially for opensource low-code frameworks ):
#6 Can it generate pdf and excel reports
#7 Does it support scheduled jobs/tasks
#8 Can you choose to execute logic in the backend ( this does not seem to be the case for retool etc which only support frontend js )
#9 Can I extend with my own js, css and backend libraries
#10 Is it horizontally scalable and stateless
#11 Drag and drop ui builder that is not hard-coded to a single css framework and that generates code that can be modified.
I have not yet found any low-code framework that fits into these benchmarks
Absolutely agree with this point. At the company I work for whenever we create reports its always done twice or thrice -
a browser version, a pdf that is printable and an excel version for business users to download and play with.
Waseem seems to have moved onto the accounting/finance world now as the CEO of Pilot. This seems to me to be an even bigger jump than kernel dev to chat software.
The variation is amazing!
Having worked on the SMB billing and accounting space for 2 years in India - its a really really tough space to monetise profitably. The market size seems huge from the outside but its a tough nut to crack.
The space is also hyper-competitive now with khatabooks, dukaan etc spending 100s of crores with no revenue.
Its seems like what you are building is a mini-ERP for SMBs in India. If you are touching AP, AR - do you have tally integration? Pretty much every SMBs auditors will ask for it.
Wow - the 4 stages of product development seems quite spot on from my experience working on b2b enterprise software products.
No doubt that the Finance team is generally the most powerful entity in shaping a companies direction both internally as well as in your clients organisation. Finance teams love control, are (mostly) completely risk-averse and change averse. The same can also be said about badly run IT teams.
I have seen product/automation implementations being deployed seamlessly in all departments from operations to procurement but completely fail due to the finance teams. In extreme cases I have seen finance teams have so much power that they even override the CEOs decisions to make implementations fail if they feel that they are loosing control or do not like the new process workflow that the implementation brings in.
For digital transformation projects the implementation team needs to speak the language of finance, operations as well as IT. Otherwise the chances of the implementation really succeeding is close to nil.
JVM or python just for the ecosystem.
kafka, debezium, workflow engines(camunda), ORMs etc - java libraries might not be as nice to use as ruby gems but some are really rock solid for your use-case.
But that being said, anything really - rails/node etc most would work just fine for your use-case
Great article. The table composed by psychologist May Seagoe fits the description of some of my friends and colleagues who I perceive as gifted perfectly.
We have written several microservices primarily for websockets in Elixir. They are great with literal zero maintenance costs..but how do Elixir developers handle the following when going all in:
1. Long running workflows - there do not seem to be popular frameworks like camunda, jbpm, temporal or cadence for elixir
2. Integration libraries - similar to apache camel
3. Inbuilt scripting engines to run user scripts like nashorn, graaljs or groovy
We really enjoy working with rails and would like to go all in into elixir. But the ecosystem of available frameworks seems to always come in the way and makes us choose spring boot or rails.
Are you onboarding suppliers on your platform with their own supplier portal for collaboration/chat? Or is only catalog data?
Does the RFI, RFQ etc processes happen within the system or outside?
How does your sourcing software integrate with existing supplier selection modules, contracts lifecycle management modules ( for compliance, audit etc) like SAP or Oracle that might already be deployed by the customer?
Is this similar to SAP ariba or coupa but with catalogs predefined?
I am assuming your models are not opensource/openweights?