How Plantasjen found the low-code sweet spot

– We have close to 100 stores in Norway and Sweden, and you'd be surprised how many IT systems we juggle to keep a garden retail operation running.

– M3, warehouse systems, point of sale, inventory management, they all need to talk. When they don’t, there’s waiting, frustrated employees and annoyed customers. Not good.

The quotes come from Aleksander Solberg, product owner in finance at Plantasjen Norway. His job is to make sure all of these systems work for the people using them.

The consultant dilemma

You can hire consultants who are experts at a particular system or process, but they need time to learn your other systems. And your industry and business.

– In an ideal world, the consultants would know best, but in reality, we usually know our industry and business needs best. On the other hand, we often don't have the technical skills or capacity to solve everything ourselves, says Aleksander.

So either you pay consultants to build something and then keep paying them to maintain it. Or, you could try a no-code solution.

– My experience with no code tools involves spending a lot of time battling rigid inputs, though. You have to force everything into the pre-designed boxes. It’s great when it works, but when it doesn’t, you get stuck.

Having your cake and eating it

Plantasjen has worked with Vince for many years now, mainly on three things: Integrations, automation and data maintenance.

– We’re really happy with the Vince consultants. They’re excellent at M3, but they are also supply chain experts that understand retail. And after working with us for so long, they know our business needs inside out, explains Aleksander.

– We handle an enormous amount of data through Vince, and we have completely automated processes that previously were impossible or really hard to automate, he continues.

This is made possible by Vince Live, a powerful integration and automation platform that lets both the Vince consultants and the customer build integrations, automations and custom solutions.

Do it yourself

The Vince platform is not no-code, but low-code. And according to Aleksander, that's a good thing.

– I can't code, but since it's low-code, I don't really need to. Once I learned how to use Vince, I could quickly build my own integrations. I can test my queries as I write them, and it works seamlessly with most applications I've worked with, he says.

The result has been a do it yourself-culture where Aleksander and his colleagues build their own solutions instead of relying on others.

– For my workday, it means I can be more efficient, be more creative and act on my own ideas.

Take the dashboard he built for Plantasjen's stores. Previously, when store employees had errors with received goods, they had to call someone for help. Long, tedious process.

– I built a dashboard that automated this entire process. Users just go in and correct the mistakes themselves. Much better for everyone, and I spent very little time setting it up.

Independence over dependency

A classic barrier to investing in new software or solutions is the risk of ending up with a lot of sunk costs.

– A lot of consultants build something they maintain themselves, which creates dependency. Vince are quite different here, says Aleksander.

– They let us take part in the building and help us create solutions we can maintain ourselves. The result is we can turn around and respond to our users' demands a lot quicker, Aleksander explains.