We all know the adage, “slow and steady wins the race.” However, in today’s fast-moving business world, including the manufacturing space, there is no place for the slow. A new breed of manufacturers is consistently adopting innovative technologies to outdistance their competitors in the race toward “Industry 4.0.”

For those manufacturing companies that are more entrenched in the sector, the productive output is often sluggish due to a bulky, extensive, and aging infrastructure that can keep them from synchronizing progress with the current pace of innovation. As these legacy organizations start to shed their cumbersome infrastructure for more agile and nimble business processes, there is an opportunity to address their challenges with low-code development platforms. These platforms enable manufacturers to use their current talent for building new applications and digitalizing different aspects of their business operations. With applications that exactly match business and production requirements built in-house, manufacturers can improve operational efficiency, manage their product lifecycles, and create digital threads and digital twins, while also enhancing the user, supplier, and customer experience. Among a multitude of low-code platforms, the one that rises to mitigate the technical challenges of today’s manufacturer with its sophisticated yet easy-to-use visual development environment is OutSystems.

The OutSystems platform enables users to develop high-performing front-ends and fit-for-purpose apps that meet order fulfillment, demand forecasting, inventory control, logistics, warehouse management, material requirements planning, and other manufacturing needs. These applications can connect legacy back-end systems to new warehouse management systems and front-end apps to offer predictive maintenance. “With OutSystems, developers can build custom-fit applications— exploiting cutting-edge technology like IIoT and robotics—that integrate with their existing business processes and systems and deliver agility and innovation,” says Forsyth Alexander, senior product marketing manager of OutSystems. “Many manufacturers are already using OutSystems to deliver mobile apps and dashboards for product planning, manufacturing, distribution, and sales. Further, these applications support barcodes and RFID scanners, and deliver continuous field operations with offline access.”

OutSystems also employs quality checks to help both professional and rookie application developers uphold the standard and effectiveness of their business apps. When it is time to deploy these applications, OutSystems checks dependencies for issues. If there is a problem in the application, OutSystems alerts developers and halts the deployment of the app until the issues are addressed.

Further highlighting the capabilities of OutSystems, Alexander adds, “On an enterprise scale, OutSystems platform allows its users to deliver front-end applications and systems that manage inventory and supply chain processes throughout their global factory sites. These solutions built with OutSystems control their machine configurations, production lines, and quality control.” To this extent, developers can start with a small application development project on the OutSystems platform and then deploy it across the organization using the integration capabilities built into the platform.