Low Code/No Code? Part 3

In this, the third part of a series examining Vtiger’s VTAP, I’ll briefly discuss some real-life customisations done for our customers using this Low Code/No Code platform.

If you missed the earlier parts, part 1 introduced the concept of Low Code/No Code and in part 2 I took a look at some of the tools, features and benefits available in Vtiger’s implementation called VTAP.

Location Lookup

The requirement was to be able to have a telephone operator have a very simple and easy to use mechanism to be able to identify the location of the caller and store this information as standard Latitude and Longitude coordinates in the CRM. Our customer then uses these coordinates in other business processes.

One of several approaches we developed to meet this requirement was to use the popular What3Words application.

Using VTAP’s Module Designer, Libertus added a single button that is displayed in the relevant page of the CRM and when clicked displays a small popup window on-screen where the operator can ask the caller and then enter the three words into a single text field and click “OK”:

Once the location has been entered, using VTAP’s API designer, Vtiger connects to the What3Words API and requests the “convert-to-coordinates” endpoint. If the location exists, What3Words returns the Latitude and Longitude which are then saved in the Vtiger CRM database.

Create related records

CRMs are all about relationships. Helping businesses to manage, and improve, their professional relationships with Customers, Vendors and Partners. Fundamentally, a CRM does this by storing data-relationships between different kinds of records. This is typically achieved by using a relational database. The way these data-relationships are presented to the CRM user, is of course, what makes a CRM useful or not. The User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) can make or break a CRM in any business.

Without going into too much technical detail, a customer of ours needed their Help Desk operators to be able to very rapidly add a new Ticket to a Contact record type in the CRM. Libertus designed a solution using VTAP whereby, in the List View of Contacts, just by hovering the mouse pointer over a row containing one Contact record, a button is displayed allowing the CRM user (if they have suitable permissions) to create a new Ticket for that Contact.

I know this customisation doesn’t sound like much but it saves the user valuable time. The normal mechanism requires the user to be viewing the Contact’s actual record (in what we call Detail View) which requires a couple more clicks of the mouse and additional data being loaded onto the screen.

Send data to an external system (ERP)

As discussed earlier in the series, most businesses require some level of integration between different applications in their IT infrastructure. At it’s most basic level this could be as simple as performing a manual entry of some data at periodic intervals, import of exported data in a suitable format such as a CSV for example. But when time becomes an issue and the business simply can’t wait for the next scheduled export/import a deeper level of system integration is required.

Vtiger’s VTAP has several options when it comes to integration. From fairly straightforward, using a button and the API designer, through to creating a new “Connector” to truly synchronise data between two applications. For this customer’s immediate requirement, we recommended and created a process that is automatic, and send data in one direction; to the customer’s ERP system.

Using VTAP’s Server Script feature, we were able to create a Workflow that triggers when a Sales Order is marked as “Approved”. When this happens, the Server Script is triggered that then collates all the necessary data from the Sales Order itself and the Organisation and the Contact that are related to it. It then sends this in a POST request to an REST API endpoint on the customer’s ERP thereby passing valuable order information to the manufacturing department automatically.

In a planned future development, the ERP will also send data back into Vtiger using the incoming Webhook feature.

Delete old/inactive records based on complex conditions

A final example of a user for VTAP came about due to a customer’s desire to maintain good “data quality” in their CRM. Think about how many stale, dead and totally irrelevant old Leads do you might have in your system?

Server Jobs is a part of the VTAP family of tools that lets developers write code that evaluates some particular aspect of your CRM data and then performs the desired actions on that data, in the background, at a pre-determined frequency.

For this particular customer, they were creating a relatively large number of new Contact records as a normal part of their business. But after a few months, most of these records were no longer needed and should be deleted from the system. Libertus wrote a Server Job to run once per day which identifies any Contact records that meet a set of criteria:

• Inactivity of at least 3 months
• No related “open” Quotes
• A Contact Type of “Delivery Required”
• No parent Organisation

Each night, the Server Job searches for any Contact records that meet the criteria and then removes them from the CRM*.

* Technically, when a record is first deleted it is moved into the recycle bin, where it can be restored within 30 days if required. This is the same with our Server Job implementation).

Conclusions

In this three-part series of blog posts I’ve introduced the basic concepts of Low Code/No Code and have discussed the way these tools can be used to deliver enhanced and customised functionality in cloud-based applications that was once not really possible at all. Vtiger CRM has a comprehensive suite of features within the VTAP portfolio to permit this level of customisation.

If you would like to know more, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Thank you for reading.