If you remember the Goldilocks Story, you recall she was faced with options, but wanted a solution that was "just right" for her.service people, nurses, manufacturing workers, oil and gas workers, hospitality workers, safety inspectors, miners, construction workers,
you are probably thinking about how you get the mobile apps built that you need to make your workers more productive, efficient and valuable.
- Build the apps using the native coding intensive approaches from Apple and Android (Swift, Objective C, Java)
- Build the apps using low code platforms like OutSystems, Alpha Anywhere and Mendix
- Build the apps using mobile forms products
Option 1 is fine if you have no time or budget pressure - but you will have to build 2 separate apps (apple and android,)
Option 2 is a big improvement in the sense that you can cut the development time by at least 5 times and you only have to build the app once - but you still require professional developers and it still will take weeks vs months if you went with option 1
Option 3 is use a mobile forms product that can build the apps in hours or less and you can take advantage of business people with domain knowledge
Well, based on this Option 3 sounds great!
Not so fast.
You know the old saying that if something sounds too good to be true it likely is too good to be true.
Don't get stuck having to live with a second-rate solution that simply did not get the job done properly.
The problem with Option 3 is that invariably the mobile forms products that are available simply don't have the depth to meet the real-world requirements that your apps have now or in the future. You would be very hard pressed to build mobile apps that handle common real world situations like these discussed below with regular forms products:
- You have workers servicing boilers and you want to send SMS's or emails to home office alerting the appropriate team to danger conditions determined by information collected in one or more fields
- You field workers operating in a "no signal" location, repairing equipment that is identified by QR codes. To be able to do their jobs effectively. your field people
need to be able to scan the code, lookup the type of equipment they must repair and then be able to display repair instructions or videos for that piece of equipment - You want to be able to create dynamic dispatch applications where customer information and history is retrieved from a system of record
- You want the data capture form/app to adjust or vary the questions on the fly based on any kind of calculation or validation performed on previous fields
- You want to be able to use a web service to check a VIN number on a car against a database of stolen cars and initiate a workflow based on the result
- You want to record sounds, take an unlimited number of pictures and annotate them and also be able to use "voice to text" for taking notes in the app
- You want to make your workers more efficient by taking advantage of filtered or cascading pick lists
- You want to display each record collected in any layout or summarize the data collected in a management report
So now where does that leave you? Surely there has to be a "Goldilocks" solution that does not "run of gas" as the requirements of the app grows to reflect what is in fact needed to deliver a real world solution.
Fortunately there is a solution:
That's where Alpha Software comes in.
-- Alpha TransForm starts off allowing regular line of business people (withdomain knowledge,) to build
flexible and impressive mobile apps such as this one themselves
-- Then if you need more power and control, "power" users in business units can add more functionality by taking advantage of TransForm's rich API and TPL (the TransForm programming Language)
-- Finally, if you need even more power and control, the work you do with TransForm is expandable to Alpha Anywhere - Alpha Software's #1 rated low-cod platform for developing, distributing and deploying enterprise-grade apps rapidly.
Get a free license and you'll see Alpha Software is "just right" for your organization or contact marketing@alphasoftware.com with any questions.
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