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Why Nint Chose NocoBase: Best Practices for In-House Development Transformation

Nint adopts NocoBase as the core tool for digital transformation, significantly enhancing management efficiency and resource integration capabilities.

Deng lijia |

About Nint

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Nint Digital Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (Nint) is a digital retail technology company with the mission of “Data makes the world free.” The company focuses on providing decision support services to enterprises through big data analysis. Nint has established a broad service network in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, with clients covering 80% of the global top 500 consumer goods companies, as well as thousands of brands and e-commerce stores.

In the wave of digital transformation, Nint has been exploring how to use technology to improve management efficiency and business decision-making. At the beginning of the digital transformation journey, Nint firmly chose to develop its own systems. The reason was simple: there were too many customization needs, and the available products in the market at the time couldn’t support them.

Identifying Bottlenecks in In-House Digital Management Systems

As Nint continues to expand, its in-house digital management system is facing several key challenges:

  1. Agility in Iteration With rapid changes in business innovation and management demands, the need for faster iterations of the internal system has grown significantly, adding pressure on the digital development team.
  2. Cross-Department Collaboration As business volume increases and operations expand, seamless collaboration across departments—including procurement, inventory, production, sales, HR, finance, assets, and marketing—has become crucial. Establishing a unified digital platform to integrate workflows, streamline processes, and provide clear operational pathways is now a pressing priority.
  3. Architectural Scalability As enterprise management processes evolve, the existing system architecture struggles to keep up with dynamic business changes, hindering further improvements in operational efficiency.

Recognizing these challenges, Nint acknowledges that an in-house development model alone is no longer sufficient to support rapid business growth. To address these issues, the company is actively exploring more flexible and efficient solutions to enhance operational agility and scalability.

Breaking the Deadlock – Introducing No-Code Development Tools

Nint’s digital transformation needs were clear:

  1. Efficient management of people, finance, and tasks.
  2. Comprehensive integration of multiple systems and data sharing.
  3. Ensuring the security and autonomy of code and data.
  4. Keeping construction and maintenance costs low.

After researching various digital tools on the market, Nint began to focus on the potential of open-source low-code/no-code platforms. The flexibility and ease of use of these tools could quickly meet the company’s customization needs while significantly reducing development and maintenance costs. After evaluating over 50 systems, Nint ultimately chose NocoBase as a key tool for their digital transformation.

We searched GitHub for low-code/no-code systems, and there were many systems available, offering a wide variety of features.

Popular tools such as Storybook, Supabase, NocoDB, n8n, Directus, Appsmith, ToolJet, Budibase, Node-RED, ERPNext, and Odoo are all excellent tools with high ratings.

During our selection process, we noted that many systems were either cloud services or had excessively high costs for local deployment, which limited their flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Then we discovered NocoBase: open-source, drag-and-drop design, complete workflows, plugin system, simple technical architecture, and affordable commercial plugins. After researching over 50 systems, we decided to choose NocoBase.

—— Gu Zhi Chao, Director of Digital Technology Services, Nint

Key Features of NocoBase and How They Align with Nint’s Needs:

  • Open-Source and Flexibility: Supports plugin-based development, allowing enterprises to flexibly customize functionality.
  • Ease of Use: The WYSIWYG UI editor and configurable operations significantly lower the barriers to system development and usage.
  • Data Security and Permission Management: Supports field-level data permissions to meet strict corporate data security requirements.
  • Multi-Data Source Compatibility: Compatible with multiple databases like MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB, enabling real-time integration of external data.
  • Complete Workflow Support: Supports full-process automation for complex approval scenarios.

During the testing phase, NocoBase’s flexibility and efficiency left a strong impression on the team, offering new insights into the digital upgrade of internal management.

Implementation and Results

During the introduction of NocoBase, Nint’s team fully leveraged its open-source nature to optimize the system according to the company’s specific needs, while also contributing some of the results back to the NocoBase open-source community.

In the early stages, the following achievements were made:

  1. Process Optimization: By solidifying more than 30 core business processes, Nint quickly customized new process iteration capabilities, improving internal management efficiency.
  2. Centralized Asset Management: Over 3,000 cloud and fixed assets were centrally managed, greatly reducing management complexity.
  3. Data Integration and Sharing: Broke down data silos between departments, enabling efficient data sharing under secure conditions.
  4. Efficiency Improvement: Through drag-and-drop design and workflow capabilities, development cycles were significantly shortened, and non-technical personnel could quickly build systems.
  5. Shift in Development Model: The R&D team was freed from heavy foundational development work and started focusing on innovative design.

These achievements marked a significant milestone in Nint’s digital transformation, resulting in a notable improvement in corporate management efficiency and resource integration capabilities.

Nint’s digital transformation.png

Nint’s digital transformation.png

Looking to the Future

Through NocoBase, we’ve seen the new possibilities that technology brings. In the future, we look forward to working with NocoBase to help more companies drive digital transformation.

Nint plans to apply NocoBase to more management scenarios, gradually replacing scattered management tools. The company also intends to explore higher-level applications in data analysis and intelligence to further enhance business decision-making capabilities.

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