The Support Group Blog

Many of our clients are looking for technology to streamline and automate their business workflows to grow their businesses. Administrative tasks have a way of weighing teams down. When you convert a paper process to a digital workflow, that can go a long way to free up time. In addition, when you automate a digital process, that can save even more time. You can reallocate that time to other revenue-generating activities such as sales tasks, marketing strategies, product development, etc.

We develop technology for organizations to operate at their optimum. For example, we've helped solve business problems related to inventory management, event planning, custom reporting, and much more. Yes, off-the-shelf software addresses these types of workflows, but they don't always offer every function every user needs. So rather than finding a work-around or waiting for a feature release, companies customize their own software to do specifically what they need it to do when they need to do it.

Technical debt costs companies across America billions of dollars each year. This creeping problem can slow work and create new work for developers, and it only worsens over time. If you don't work on the technical side of things, you may not even know when it happens.

Keeping your technical debt down requires more than just knowing what technical debt is. It takes conscious effort from both the development team and management, and most companies have no system to manage technical debt. Keep reading to learn about technical debt and what you can do to get ahead of it.

We expect the adoption of no-code platforms to continue to rise, mainly because the end-users/process experts appreciate easily customizable tools that are less time-consuming for IT to manage. Folks will be reluctant to return to the bureaucratic way of doing things once they experience the power to solve their problems and improve their productivity. With more people now working from home, or at least not from a centralized office, there's a clear motivation to take the bull by the horn and develop a solution on their own as opposed to waiting for someone else to fix a problem. No-code platforms empower the user to create customized solutions that don't involve the continuous back and forth among groups of disinterested parties, who, unlike the end-user, don't burn with the passion for just getting the work done.

COVID-19 prompted many businesses to shift to online working. The pandemic has increased the need for digitization and automation. Since the pandemic began, the number of executives describing low-code development platforms as a priority investment has almost tripled.

Read on to learn how you can use low-code development to digitize your workflows.

Software development has come a long way in the last few decades. In the early days, computers were programmed using machine code or an assembler, which required dozens of instructions to perform even the most straightforward task, such as displaying text on the screen.

As computers became more human-friendly, those low-level programming languages were replaced with more human-readable ones such as C, and later even higher level, meaning more abstract, languages such as BASIC. These are known as high-level programming languages because more steps are required to translate the code into machine-readable instructions.

Imagine coding an app from scratch. How long do you think it would take you to develop and perfect it? How much effort do you think it would take to maintain and debug it? 

Low-code development platforms negate these types of questions. You can use some code or no code to develop an app to improve your workflows. What's more, you can apply your technical and non-technical skills to design the app. Keep reading to learn about low-code and what makes for an excellent low-code development platform.

The use of technology has expanded massively in the last few years. Mobile apps, smart devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) mean that even the most mundane devices now run some form of "software." According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment statistics reflect this with the growth of job opportunities for software developers, at 21%. We are on the brink of a developer shortage, and citizen developers could be vital to keeping businesses moving in the modern world.

When you're running a business, every dollar counts. And every second counts. That's why running your business as efficiently as possible is so critical.

Fortunately, that's where the Claris FileMaker software development tool comes in.

So, what is FileMaker exactly? And how can you use it to improve your business operations?

Here's a rundown on what FileMaker is and how to use it effectively for your organization.

Let's jump in!

We're living in a time when people need solutions to their workplace challenges and they need them immediately. Due to COVID-19, many of us are working under different circumstances and in different environments. We may have spent the first week or so setting up our new workspaces and adapting to new workflows and communication tools. But now it's time to focus on the work. Customers need to be serviced, reports need to be generated and projects need to be managed. You're lucky if your operations were 100% portable and you were able to maintain 100% efficiency when things upended. That's probably the exception, not the rule. For the most part, we're adjusting to new workflows and timelines. We guess that productivity has mostly been redefined. Your spreadsheets and appliance apps may have worked a few months ago but may not cut it now.

Technology has changed the way companies do business these days. Efficiency and accuracy often set the foundation for a successful business. To get there, you need to do away with your manual spreadsheets and automate your business processes. 

We understand that sometimes people become comfortable with their way of doing business – but to truly be successful, you must be willing to change. 

With 2020 upon us what better time to ditch the business spreadsheets and take your company from manual to automated with custom business solutions?