Global Marketing and Consumer Goods Firm Launches Innovative Mobile Apps Quickly and Economically.

A main reason the company is reaping huge benefits now is because before the company built a single application, it developed a component strategy.

Developers around the world now can assemble apps faster using reusable components, an approach that effectively combines the targeted ability to develop locally with the efficiency of a shareable and centralized global repository.

“Basically, we were able to centralize the application development approach without centralizing the actual application development itself,” said the global manager (GM) of web and native apps. And with components driving development efforts, the GM added, “instead of always thinking only in terms of apps, we started to think in terms of capabilities.

“For example, if one of our business regions builds a QR code scanner, that scanner now is “component-ized” and shared so that development teams around the world can bring that capability into their own business-owner-facing apps with minimal effort.

The GM offered an anecdote that illustrates just how powerful this ability is: Our Latin American development team was expected to launch an app, and with the App Factory in place, instead of having to build that app from scratch, developers were able to incorporate components that had already been created in Korea and India.

“That allowed us to reduce the time and cost of the project by half,” said the GM.

This also speaks to the extent to which the company’s component strategy has spurred more development collaboration by building trust between geographically disperse teams, while also reducing the burden on IT.

“To strategize a component, more of our development teams across the world have started talking to each other. By the time it actually culminates in a component, the teams have already aligned.” said the Manager of IT Sales Solutions. “And from an IT standpoint, I have to develop less, I have to manage less, and I have to maintain less.

Meanwhile, those in the development trenches are similarly encouraged by how HCL Volt MX low-code development has eased their efforts. “The platform really delivers on that promise, said the Senior Digital Specialist of Native Apps. “A lot of widgets are easily available in the platform for dragging and dropping to build your application.”

As an added benefit, the company gets extensive analytics on the performance of its apps, and it can feed those reports into the development cycle, creating a continuous improvement loop.
 

Driving Continuous Innovation

Going forward, the company is working on incorporating advanced technologies such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence and voice recognition into its environment. The GM said AR is a particular area of focus because of its potential to transform the product demonstration experiences that the business owners present to customers.

“We have developed an SDK that allows us to drop augmented reality capabilities into the apps we build with Volt MX” the GM said. For example, he offered a scenario in which a business owner is showing a customer a water or air filtration system. Instead of having to drag the entire unit onto the sales call, the business owner can instead use AR to provide a thorough virtual tour of the product and its design.

Any way you look at it, the company’s mobile strategy, powered by HCL Volt MX, is enabling the company to start writing a successful next chapter in its history. Perhaps the most important indicator is the bottom line, and there’s good news there: Our company reported revenue of $8.8 billion last year, a two-percent increase over the year before, and executives attribute that improvement in part to the company’s investments in digital transformation, specifically mobility.

The way the VP sees it, HCL Volt MX has simply made the company’s business stronger.