There are a number of advantages to the Salesforce Lightning Platform, including its lightweight design, ease of use, and customizability, but with a recent announcement that everybody’s favorite CRM has come out with two new tools—Lightning Object Creator and Lightning Flow Builder—we can add a new benefit to the list: no-code app creation is a breeze. Let’s take a closer look at what the advantages are of software with low- and no-code capabilities as well as what makes Salesforce Lightning Object Creator and Lightning Flow Builder so special in particular.

Why Low- or No-code Software?

While every company has its established practices and procedures for how it likes to do business, there’s no denying that the ability to adapt to changing circumstances is necessary to survive. That being said, making changes to one’s CRM is never a task to be undertaken lightly, especially if those changes require heavy coding work. That takes development time, energy, and a host of other resources, so what if there was a solution that required low amounts of code (or even no code)? That’s what makes the Lightning Platform so attractive.

Salesforce’s lightweight low-/no-code software, the Lightning Platform makes it easy for companies to change up the way they do business. Plus, a recent study from IDC shows that companies doing development on the Lightning Platform not only enjoyed a 545% ROI over five years, but that their app lifecycle got 63% faster and they reported a 5.8X increase in features developed by business users. What’s not to love?

Two New Tools in the Toolbox

But the good times don’t stop there. Thanks to the new Salesforce Lightning Object Creator and Lightning Flow Builder, it’s easier than ever for users to customize their CRM as needed. Lightning Object Creator is a new platform service that allows users to convert spreadsheets into custom objects inside your CRM deployment, all without any code—just clicks. These custom objects support a ton of features—including an open API, built-in social feeds, global search, custom relationships, and more—which makes it easy as pie for users to build apps based on them. Meanwhile, Lightning Flow Builder (which works off of the Lightning Design System) makes it simple to automate customer and employee experiences. The process is made even simpler thanks to the fact that the Flow Builder can use the custom objects created by the Object Creator as well as a host of Flow Actions found in the AppExchange. These Flow Actions, often created by third parties, are pre-built components designed for specific industries and use cases and make automating workflows and creating apps a breeze.

Apps You Can Use to Boost Your Business

All of the above sounds wonderful in the abstract, but what are some specific, concrete app examples you can use to kickstart your company into gear? Read on for a few suggestions, and remember, when creating apps like these, the Salesforce Process Builder is the go-to place to build your workflow logic.

HR
Useful in any industry, an app that can automate the recruiting and offer approval process, help the hiring team identify bottlenecks, set up email alerts for different activities (like new applicants), and even post jobs to places like Indeed automatically can save your team a lot of time and manual effort. HR apps can also be used for intranet and benefits.

IT
Lightning Platform apps can serve a wide variety of need for IT. From keeping an eye on quality control and licensing to managing projects, there are plenty of pre-built apps for IT on the AppExchange. Plus, thanks to Heroku, Salesforce has made it simple for the technically-minded to create their own apps, giving them the ability to fine-tune the platform to their heart’s content.

Operations
Imagine you have someone who needs to inspect physical machines in a manufacturing environment and relies on a paper inspection form that they fill out and plug into a spreadsheet somewhere. To save themselves time and effort, they create an app that digitizes the inspection form and pulls in a managed component from the AppExchange that allows them to visualize the machines they’re inspecting. To make things even easier, our inspector adds a custom component created by their development team (in Heroku, naturally) that uses Einstein Vision’s image classification abilities and machine learning to identify all the different types of equipment they might expect to inspect just from a picture. (Handy if our inspector is using their phone to take a photo during the inspection.)

Payroll
Timekeeping is obviously very important when it comes to payroll, but keeping track of everyone’s time can be a bit of a pain. But a timekeeping app built in the Lightning Platform can eliminate a lot of the busywork. Simply create fields for every employee, the types of work they need to log, and the hours they need to log. Process Builder’s logic will help you calculate and tally up hours and break down times by departments. And to help you plan for the future, Einstein Predictions can help you look at time usage patterns and even make predictions about where your needs will lie.

Clearly, there are plenty of advantages to be had by using the Salesforce Lightning Platform. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and makes it easy to create custom apps for your business and customer needs. But what if you’re still rocking Salesforce Classic, or you still need help getting the Lightning Platform to do what you’d like it to? Not to worry—Surety Systems has got your back. From Analytics and CPQ to Data Integration and Community Cloud setup, our senior-level Salesforce consultants will be able to help you get things ticking along like a well-oiled machine. After all, Salesforce is an incredibly powerful CRM. Don’t you want to use it as effectively as possible?