- 15 min read
- ADITYA GUPTA
Introduction
The average cycle time for building custom software usually ranges between 4-12 months from requirement capture to testing and final deployment. The timeline could stretch either way depending on how complex the build is. But in the era of SaaS, custom software development is quickly becoming a thing of past with developers building, testing, and deploying new enhancements in the cloud every couple of weeks or so.
However, this does not take away from the fact that every business has its own very niche requirements that even the most intuitively built software cannot fulfill out of the box, which is especially true for large enterprises with diversified operations. As a result, developers spend weeks writing and testing new code to create minor custom functionalities, which often results in multiple code bases across customer deployments for a single SaaS solution. In turn, patching and release management becomes a nightmare for the development team. The customer also ends up having to wait weeks before a new functionality becomes available to them in the production environment.
High on Code, Low on Flexibility
To bypass the issues around custom coding, enterprises often resort to using business process management tool as a go between to create workflows that support complex rulesets. However, unlike BMP solutions, most CLM platforms out there use workflows with hardcoded states, essentially indicating that they cannot be configured. Only new workflow states can be added, which requires engineering intervention. As a result, agreement workflow states that are visible on the UI, search filters, search results, and core reports cannot be modified. Some workflows are built on a Windows workflow foundation, which has its own set of technical limitations that could hinder future portability.
Even if a new workflow is coded and created by the engineering team on demand, there’s a strong possibility of data corruption during state transition of workflows. Such issues can only be addressed through technical redressal of data associated with thousands of contracts. In most cases, due to time constraints, this issue is addressed with data fixes in the customer’s production environment and is not patched at a platform level so it can benefit all customers.
End users also face considerable difficulty managing a fundamental component of a workflow – the underlying rules engine. These are often notoriously effort- and time-intensive to set up and maintain by non-technical users, especially if they do allow rules to be updated or modified through an intuitive interface. This in turn leaves very little room for users to validate the new workflow ruleset without actually executing the flow on system in a ‘live fire’ exercise. For enterprises with a mature CLM practice, this should be considered a dealbreaker especially if the solution vendor offers to configure the rules engine as a chargeable service (because they need to hardcode the changes into the system).
Zero Code Configurability
Sirion’s diverse customer base cuts across industry verticals and we predicted that it was only a matter of time before we would find ourselves trying to answer a key question: configure or customize? For us, the answer was rather simple since we had already taken a call on Day Zero to empower our customers with the ability to customize almost every aspect of Sirion.
Our solution: no-code configuration.
Our customers are usually legal, sales, delivery and procurement professionals who would need to rely on IT resources to configure Sirion, which is why we felt that Sirion should be a no-code platform – an essential differentiator that would help cut down implementation cycles and drive unprecedented adoption among end-users.
Today, our customers only need administrator rights to:
- Add or remove custom fields to Sirion’s forms. The intuitive user interface is easy to understand and a quick tutorial page offers a step-by-step guide on how to add fields.
- Configure custom fields as nested fields that are automatically available to end-users when certain threshold values are fulfilled.
- Modify existing workflows using a powerful Excel-based interface.
- Configure Sirion for granular role-based access control and choose exactly how much every user within their organization can see and do.
- Train Sirion’s AI model to recognize and extract custom fields.
Visual workflow configurator
Simply put, Sirion has been architected to ensure that we never need to look under the hood and tinker with the code to align our solution with a customer’s unique needs, no matter how complex the engagement or business process.
If you want to learn more about this feature and how Sirion’s other zero code configurations work, drop us a line at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.
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