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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

Nint.PNG

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.

Limitations of In-House Development

Although the in-house developed systems initially met the company’s needs, they also brought limitations:

  • Increased Burden of System Iteration: Frequent iterations put immense pressure on the R&D team, and resource input kept rising.
  • Data Silos: Data between systems for HR, finance, projects, assets, customers, and products were not interconnected, limiting cross-departmental collaboration efficiency.
  • Lack of Flexibility: As internal management processes adjusted, the in-house system struggled to respond quickly to new demands.

For example, there were over 140 different application entry points scattered across their platform, which couldn’t provide a unified operational experience. Additionally, some internal processes relied on manual management, which made it difficult to adapt to the rapidly growing business needs.

Nint realized that relying solely on the traditional in-house development model could no longer meet the future management requirements of the company. As a result, the company decided to seek a more flexible and efficient solution.

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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