My name is Thomas Meyerhans-Gülle, I am a Solution Architect & Project Manager at Genius4u Consulting, and I would like to share my story of how you can bring much more value to both customers and their company.
I am constantly in close contact with customers, focusing on their requirements and looking for ways to simplify the ways to manage and customize their systems. The Sugar platform is very flexible and rich in functionality and can be easily extended, mostly without coding. However, almost every customer has specific automation needs that are not covered by the out-of-the-box features and require programming. In most cases, this is due to the exchange of data with other systems, the automation of data quality control or smart data sharing, the regular creation or updating of data based on complex conditions, or when a specific event occurs.
It is possible to quickly agree with the customer on the logic of solving such tasks, but it is not always possible to ensure an affective and rapid implementation, especially if the customer doesn't really exactly know what they want.
We also have to wait for the developers to be available, and once they are available to immerse them in the details and specifics of a particular customer. If we can't solve a customer's request completely during one iteration, or if a customer asks to make some changes based on the usage results, the solution can take weeks or even months.
However, there can be major issues when it comes time to update the Sugar core and ensure the compatibility of custom solutions with a new version. When there are many programmed customizations, developers become a real bottleneck. They need to dig into the custom code written months or even years ago, often by another programmer, and modify it to ensure compatibility. All this must be tested and transferred to the customer to leverage a new version from SugarCRM. And sure, it should be done in a tight time frame. As a result, many resources are spent, but there is little value for the customer because we do not create anything new.
Luckily, we found Logic Builder from Integros, a no-code tool that allows analysts to literally draw algorithms to automate a wide variety of tasks in Sugar without involving programmers. This changed my work dramatically.
Once I have talked to a customer, I drew a flowchart in Logic Builder and generate a Sugar extension based on it, which I install and show to the customer. If they ask to modify something, it takes me from a few minutes to a few hours to get ready and to discuss an improved solution with the customer. Such efficiency allows solving the customer's request much faster and freeing developers to solve more complex tasks which are beyond the power of low-code tools.
What is more important – the problem of ensuring the compatibility of the custom extensions created in this way disappeared. It is enough just to regenerate the package in which the Sugar-checker has found incompatibility with the new version and replace the old package with the new one. Minimum time and effort - maximum result.
Although I had to spend almost a week mastering Logic Builder, I can now perform way more things for our customers and the company. It's a win-win.
