Engineering is a complex industry with many different branches. Each branch includes divergent business processes and specialized business stages. This means that the fields, calculations, and workflows of the corresponding companies are highly variable. However, there is a point where all of these disparate branches meet: their usage of spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets are quite easy to use and comprehend, flexible and accessible. They have been used by companies across a variety of different platforms for decades, becoming a friend and savior for many engineering companies that utilize these software packages to build tools ranging from complex calculation models to workflows.
Automating these various processes with a No-Code approach may provide companies across these industries with a strategic advantage, while aiding to minimize error rates.
The Need to Convert Spreadsheets into a Web Platform
Despite all the advantages spreadsheets provide and the different areas of use, they can lead companies to a dead-end when concurrent usage, customers, and workflow tracking are added to the equation. Engineering – by its very nature – appeals to a variety of different people and entails a lot of intricate specifications and complex details.
Some of the key points in making a successful engineering company include seamless end-to-end operations, accuracy, and the ability to provide fast and effective solutions to their customers. In companies that appeal to large audiences, breaking down the entire business into spreadsheets can lead to many mistakes. Sharing spreadsheets with many people can compromise the security of the information contained in them, important data can be easily lost with the edits made to them, and minor formula errors can result in a lot of damage. For these reasons, moving these spreadsheets to a web platform can benefit engineering companies in many ways.
Why Do Engineering Companies Prefer No-Code Approach?
For an engineering company, creating a web application using No-Code allows them to provide all of their complex calculations, wrapped in a layer of data security. It can improve their overall efficiency across their work stages with easy tracking, and – perhaps most importantly - provide a user-friendly interface for their customers. Compared to classic from-scratch development, the No-Code approach is extremely time and resource effective, often saving tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of development hours.
Applications created with a No-Code approach are built based on the company's spreadsheets, meaning that there are no changes to the calculations, terms, and layout that companies are familiar with. Additionally, a user-friendly and highly customizable interface can be provided. The in-house workflow can be monitored more easily and some of the problems experienced with traditional spreadsheet usage can be easily avoided by automating these business processes.
Many Features in One Application
The ways in which spreadsheets may be beneficial and detrimental to engineering companies have been noted, but what about the important features that cannot be handled in spreadsheets but are possible on web platforms?
There can be many different user roles and workflows within an engineering company, making it quite difficult to ensure and validate these business processes using spreadsheets. When engineering companies decide to turn their spreadsheets into a web application, they get an opportunity to use new features that can take their company to the next level.
By converting their spreadsheets into web applications, engineering companies get a chance to lead their customers to a quicker and more efficient purchasing process and provide better service to them. Using product configuration, they can empower their sales representatives to offer the best possible variation and price without going through complex spreadsheets. Creating proposal documents, work orders, and enabling digital signatures to collect signatures from customers can also be huge advantages. Finally, engineering companies can easily automate their entire workflow from project estimation to completion with periodic reports and analysis.
The Future Benefits of Converting Your Spreadsheets into Web Applications
Employing a No-Code approach to convert spreadsheets to web applications allows engineering companies to skip the process of hiring programmers, seeking technical consultants, and waiting for weeks or months to receive the final product. The speed-to-market benefits alone can result in substantial financial savings over the long term. Often, companies may report that they save thousands of dollars and tens of hours on a weekly basis, scaling with the size of their operations.
Building web applications from scratch can be a challenging process for many engineering companies. With the No Code approach, this process can be done in a noticeably shorter timeframe. In addition to the benefit of saving weeks or months of development time, the conversion of their spreadsheets can help engineering companies fully secure their important data, make updates or changes easily without needing any developer support, and always keep their employees and clients up to date in real-time.
To learn more about converting engineering models into No-Code tools for your own company's workflow, visit https://www.spreadsheetweb.com.
