# Low-Code as Enabler of Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Industry
## 1 Introduction  
Currently, enterprises have to face increasingly difficult problems due to the increasing complexity of their internal operations and the number and intensity of the relationships between the company and the entities of its supply network. Moreover, the changing market means enterprises need a rapid and flexible response to fulfil the variable requirements of the environment. For this reason, companies require the capacity to withstand the stresses of environmental loading. This capacity has been defined as enterprise resilience. [PERSON] and Poler [1] defines it as the capacity to prevent and anticipate; to change enterprises' nature and adapt to the changing environment; and to respond to the dynamic requirements. Additionally, it is also unquestionable that enterprises have to give a response to these varying market requirements quickly. Therefore, rapidity is a very important factor in the current context. In order to enhance the resilience capacity of enterprises to make rapid and efficient responses to the market needs, efforts have been focused on development of software solutions for companies. A vast amount of research efforts in the history of computer science have been focused on the same objective:enabling the construction of software applications without recurring to traditional hand-coding and programming [2]. This is the reason why the use of agile methodologies is rising in the current context to support the digital transformation of companies. The results of the survey performed by [3] concludes that digital transformation is a work in progress, as the survey evaluates the enterprises' progress with digital transformation on a six-point scale. Respondents awarded their organisations a score of 3.74, meaning that digital transformation efforts are typically widespread, but not yet strategic or continuous. In light of this, low-code development platforms are considered as a trendy mechanism to facilitate the rapid development of software applications (apps) and also its automation to support the current enterprise needs and facilitate resilient digital transformation. The term \"low-code\" was firstly coined by Forrester Research in 2014 (Cambridge, MA, USA) [4], which states that firms prefer to choose low-code alternatives for fast, continuous, and test-and-learn delivery. Low-code development platforms are ecosystems with which apps can be developed, minimizing hand-code definition manually, because it is already built and prefigured. Low-code development platforms emphasize visual interfaces to enable people, without a technological background, to create and deploy business apps with relative ease [5]. The main objective of the low-code development platforms is to allow enterprises to develop apps without complex engineering facilitating their configuration, and then achieving, rapidity and agility. Moreover, these platforms also offer enterprises a more economical way to fulfil the market and/or enterprises internal requirements. With the low-code development platforms, enterprises can create programs or apps for mobile or desktop devices, multifunctional and with high information-management capabilities. Many experts [3,4,6] point out the successful future of these platforms, highlighting their main benefits:  
* Privacy. As the apps can be developed by users without a deep expertise in technical issues, enterprises trust their staff and these development tasks are not usually outsourced to third parties but performed internally which increases the confidentiality [3]. * Rapidity. As the main part of the code is already developed, users only have to visually configure the apps instead of hand-coding them or make the necessary adjustments to develop the apps they need [3]. As the development time is reduced, the availability of the apps is very fast. A survey performed by Forrester [6] showed that low-code development platforms accelerated development by 5 to 10 times. * Cost reduction.