What began as a powerful tool for self-service data analysis has routinely been abused as an imperfect but ubiquitous stand-in to manage business processes. It’s only too easy to spin up a new Excel sheet, fill it with data and start emailing it back and forth to your colleagues.
Because business process is deeply ingrained into AgilePoint’s DNA, we appreciate that Excel’s prevalence in this context is a product of its simplicity in getting started – it’s simply the path of least resistance. It is with that in mind that we embarked on our own journey to provide straightforward tooling to replace these Excel-managed processes many years back. Today, that journey is complete.
Phase 1: Excel to Data Entity, to Form-Based App
The first major leap forward in bringing governance and centralized management to Excel processes took place a few years back, when we introduced the ability for application designers to instantly create a Data Entity through a spreadsheet upload. For this, the first row of your sheet would be imported as columns in the Data Entity, and anything below that would become records in that table. From there, users could easily bind fields of the table to from controls in the user interface. It was (and still is) a pretty nifty feature. The only problem was that it still relied on some basic AgilePoint knowledge to lay out the interface itself. I’m glad to tell you that as of today, this is no longer the case.
Phase 2: GenAI Builds It All!
In the video below, you’ll see how AgilePoint takes on all the heavy lifting by automating the creation of the Data Entity table, as well as the entire form-based application itself! Just like the other GenAI videos you might have seen in the past weeks, AgilePoint still provides me with ample ability to refine the suggested columns for the Data Entity by adding or removing fields, reclassifying the data types, and rearranging the order of those columns until things are just right.
Why Would I Want This?
We touched on a few of the major drivers in shifting away from managing business processes in Excel, but here’s a comprehensive list.
- Centralized Management of Data – One of the primary challenges of any Excel-centric process, is that it is only too easy to have multiple versions of the truth. Users would often save these sheets to their PC, and pretty soon there are multiple versions flying around, none of which contain the complete data set. With the AgilePoint solution, the apps are located centrally, and always up to date.
- Improved Data Validation – Excel does offer a limited ability to validate inputs into the various cells, with 10 or so field types. The challenge here is that these don’t cover the full range of inputs that might be required. Compare that with the 70 out of the box controls offered in the AgilePoint platform (and not to mention the rules that can be applied), you can rest assured that the data entered is of the highest quality.
- Better Governance – Again, Excel does bring some basic governance to the table, but does not offer the level of control that most Enterprises require. Through AgilePoint’s comprehensive layered security and governance framework, you can apply the precise level of control that your organization and use case dictates.
- Integration with 3rd Party Data Sources – While AgilePoint doesn’t yet automate the integration of 3rd party data sources into applications, you might already know that it’s quite straightforward, and doesn’t require expert-level skills. With dozens of out of the box lookups, it’s never been easier to bring in external data for a more full-featured application.
So lets have a look at this feature, and as always, please share your thoughts down below in the comments!
Please note that this video is recorded while this feature is in limited-preview beta version. Some of the labels and icons might change by the time it goes GA but the general concept of generating an app would remain the same.