In an age of online banking, physical money can sometimes feel defunct. Not at G4S. A global security firm, its UK Cash Solutions team conducts 15,000 cash-in-transit services each and every day, collecting deposits and replenishing ATMs up and down the country.
Yet if the world of steel cases and armoured vans hasn’t fully disappeared, G4S isn’t immune to digital pressures either. On the road, for example, drivers use handheld devices to confirm routes and scan deliveries. On the client side, G4S customers go online to track when important shipments are arriving.
In reality, however, Albert Clement says that developing the systems needed for G4S’s vast operations long proved challenging.
With only a small in-house coding team, the head of solutions development at G4S traditionally relied on outside support. “That,” Clement stresses, “is a very lengthy process,” adding that by the time third-party products went live, they might already be obsolete.
That was echoed by other problems. With clients using a range of bespoke portals, G4S struggled to offer the same look and feel across each one. As Clement puts it: “We wanted to improve the user experience by offering one self-service oriented customer portal replacing the existing ones.”
Apart from being confusing, and hampering client peace of mind, this disordered approach impacted the company in other ways. With timestamp data accessible only to staff, for instance, customers were instead contacting G4S for shipment updates. That piled pressure on Clement’s customer support team, especially when workers didn’t always have the relevant information to hand.
With drivers expected to offer customers receipts upon delivery, wobbly digitalisation moreover forced them to kit out their vans with physical printers. But these sometimes broke down – delaying their precious cargo’s onward journey.
G4S embraces low-code
Given these challenges, Clement unsurprisingly began searching for a solution – with the executive soon alighting on ‘low-code’ technology.
As the name implies, this approach to software development is distinct from the ‘high-code’ alternative. Doing away with sophisticated programming languages like Python, low-code instead allows developers to create accessible platforms in just a few clicks.
“You don’t need much coding skill” to work with low-code, explains Varsha Mehta, a principal at Gartner, describing how users can simply drag-and-drop features from prebuilt lists. That, Mehta adds, results in “faster delivery timelines” than ever before.
The statistics surely reflect her enthusiasm. As research by ResearchAndMarkets has found, the global low-code market could reach $187.bn by 2030, even as 43% of EMA companies were using the technology last year.
Whatever the theoretical benefits of low-code, of course, Clement and G4S still had to pick a specific partner for their low-code journey. In the end, they went with Mendix, a Siemens subsidiary and leading sector player.
That’s clearest when it comes to Vista, a comprehensive platform that shepherds G4S staff and clients into one coherent portal. Beyond dispensing with the earlier gaggle of logins and credentials, this low-code system automatically places customer data in a single, accessible place. As Clement explains, this allows clients to track shipments themselves.
And if that’s permitted Clement to streamline his customer service team, the portal has also sharpened G4S operations in the field. Leveraging the “data transparency” Vista provides, UK Cash Solutions managers can now seamlessly track the performance of regional branches, a key first step to bolstering efficiency.
It doubtless helps that those unreliable mobile printers are gone too – replaced by e-receipts that clients can check in Vista.
Generative AI boost for low-code in the offing
Three years on from inking his Mendix deal, Clement doesn’t regret his choice. Its low-code platform, he says, remains the “right tool” for his team – but that hardly means the migration from high-code has been completely straightforward.
As you might expect from a platform built on accessibility, the issue isn’t the tech itself, but rather the cultural changes needed to get users comfortable with Vista.
That’s hardly surprising. For clients comfortable with email and spreadsheets, moving to a single online portal isn’t necessarily easy.
As Clement says, change management is about “awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement.” While some users embraced Vista quickly, moreover, others proved more reluctant. To shift customer behaviour permanently, one option was therefore to shut down the default communication channel with G4S: email.
With an increasing number of services now conducted through Vista, meanwhile, Clement is equally focused on the future. Once again, low-code’s flexibility is key here, with Mendix compatible with G4S’s Google Cloud Platform. In practice, that makes understanding and manipulating information remarkably straightforward. If, for example, the data flags rising crime in particular areas, Clement says delivery route maps could easily be tweaked.
At the same time, both experts seem excited about how low-code could be integrated with machine learning.
“Generative AI is already adding code completion, code generation testing, debugging” to low-code platforms, Mehta says, arguing this presages a world where even rookie developers can build robust systems at speed. Considering the pressure Clement and his G4S team are under, that’s surely good news.
