ServiceNow App Engine: Building Scalable Solutions Without Coding Expertise

Do you know? According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study, businesses using the ServiceNow App Engine have achieved a 230% ROI over three years.

They were able to streamline their overall operations by creating applications and workflows that simplified their business management, resulting in operational improvements and ROI growth.

Looking at this astonishing figure of return on investment, you must be keen to know how App Engine can benefit your business. To explore the same, delve into this blog post and discover the transformative capabilities of ServiceNow App Engine.

Let’s get started!

What is ServiceNow App Engine?

Built on the Now Platform, App Engine is itself a platform that encompasses various features and capabilities that support application development, deployment, quality, security, and integration.

Simply put, think of it as an environment where you get separate tools and components that have distinguished functionality. Yet, these components work together to simplify application and workflow development, test their quality, maintain security, and integrate them with ServiceNow Modules.

It supports both low-code and pro-code application development approaches, allowing your business’s technical as well as non-technical teams to design and deploy workflows.

Key Components of ServiceNow App Engine

Let’s explore what features App Engine has to offer:

1. ServiceNow App Engine Studio

It is a key component offered by App Engine, specially designed for non-tech experts to create applications that help you simplify your day-to-day activities.

Think of it as a collaborative dashboard with various low-code capabilities such as drag-and-drop components, application templates, hints, and guided dev flows that help you create a solution without relying on the technical team.

It lets you:

• Add data through tables and spreadsheets
• Add experiences by creating portals and workspaces
• Add automation using pre-defined or made-from-scratch workflows and
• Add security by assigning relevant roles and permissions to users.

2. Now Assist for Creators

This tool leverages generative AI capability, which allows users to speed up their application development process and boost productivity.

You can start by describing your application requirements in natural language and further set up user roles, tables, and more through conversational prompts.

Describe your playbook—a detailed description of what the application does, and how it moves further—and let Now Assist do the work for you by creating the application with relevant functionalities. It eliminates the need for extensive coding and builds the application easily and quickly.

3. App Engine Management Center

It provides a single dashboard to oversee all aspects of the application development from its initial start to its deployment.

You can govern various app ideas through this dashboard, approve them, and allow the right developers and collaborators to access the information and work on it. Plus, you get a comprehensive view of all the management activities, allowing you to categorize similar activities into groups for faster development.

With this dashboard, you can maintain control over multiple applications, look into their development lifecycle, and safeguard information by ensuring compliance with governance standards.

4. Studio IDE

The Studio Integrated Development Environment is a comprehensive environment where your developers get everything they need to code, debug, and deploy mobile or desktop apps.

This environment is focused on streamlined collaboration between developers. It gives a single source of control where you can manage, version, branch, and collaborate over code ensuring the changes are tracked and organized. You can set breakpoints in the code that are visible to other developers, analyze its working, and resolve issues isolatedly, without any modifications to the main code until it is completely correct.

Furthermore, it allows you to manage developer resource access, allowing them to access only the resources that are relevant to them, eliminating any chaos or third-party interference.

With a single click, you can publish your application to the ServiceNow Store or save it to the application repository for future improvements.

5. Process Automation Designer

A comprehensive interface that provides every flow or application-development process on a single page in Kanban-style format. This way, you can see the current status of the workflows, such as identification, logging, resolve, and closure state, monitor the progress, and tackle inefficiencies.

You can define pre-built triggers to start the process or create your own from scratch to invoke workflows, eliminating confusion on how to begin with it. Moreover, this interface stacks up various activities related to these processes and creates new variations of complex processes, allowing simplified working and faster delivery.

6. Mobile App Builder

It is an all-in-one solution for your developer’s mobile application development needs. You get an interface that offers a modern mobile experience as to how the application would look running over a mobile platform. It offers various drag-and-drop components, allowing you to format them and gain a view into a mobile preview.

In case of complexities and issues, access the guided setup that helps you proceed with mobile application development.

You can also integrate App Engine Studio and Mobile Card Builder to leverage advanced customization and create rich applications.

7. Guided Application Center

Think of it as your assistant who guides you through the application development journey, step by step.

Start by choosing the name of your app, entering data, and customizing further details. Fill in relevant information and leave the rest to the guided application center. You can choose from several interfaces for your application by previewing them and selecting the one you want to deploy.

It offers you code and a complex free development process by transforming the spreadsheet-bound processes into digital workflows, allowing better use of data.

8. Automated Test Framework

It is your one-place space to test all applications and workflows built on the ServiceNow platform. You get 600+ tests with AI-powered capabilities that accelerate testing and reduce the burden on the developer. Also, it ensures that the test is error-free and that testing quality is maintained. Every time there is any upgrade made to the solution, it automatically performs testing, eliminating manual testing every time.

You can optimize testing resources by choosing from hundreds of components that test a common functionality or can create your own by incorporating multiple parameters into a single test.

Not only applications and workflows but also you can test UI and its functionalities.

ServiceNow App Engine Pricing

App Engine offers two different packages that meet the different needs of your business. The packages’ cost is not defined by ServiceNow; however, you can request a custom quote based on your requirements.

App Engine Starter Pack

It is best suited for businesses who want to scale their applications and workflows and add new features and functionalities.

It offers all the basic features and functionalities, including:

• Studio IDE
• Mobile App Builder
• Guided Application Creator
• Delegated Development
• Service Creator
• Form Designer
• Service Portal Designer
• UI Builder
• Automated Testing Framework
• Flow Designer
• Action Designer
• Process Automation Designer
• Now Experience Platform
• Limited custom tables
• Limited number of applications can be built

App Engine Enterprise Pack

This package is best suited for businesses seeking to use app development to drive innovation and scale across the enterprise.

This pack includes all the features and functionalities from the App Engine Starter pack and also provides some additional features that are listed below:

• App Engine Studio
• Table Builder
• Workspace Builder
• App Engine Management Center
• Pre Built Templates
• Process Mining
• Performance Analytics
• Virtual Agent
• Predictive Intelligence
• Mobile Publishing
• Dynamic Translation
• ServiceNow Voice
• Universal Request Pro
• Unlimited custom tables
• Unlimited number of applications can be built

Based on your business goals and requirements, you must choose an appropriate package to get started with App Engine. However, if you are unable to decide the same, consider contacting a ServiceNow consultant.

Top Companies Using App Engine

Danone

A leading food company globally leveraged App Engine to unify 30 different systems, including IT, HR, and procurement, into a single system named MyDanone. Their employees created automated workflows to manage routine tasks such as finding information, submitting expenses, and requesting time off, resulting in saving 14,000 hours of time and improving employee satisfaction, reflected by a CSAT score of 4.7. Simultaneously, they streamlined support queries leading to a €600,000 saving in help desk costs.

Moreover, with the low-code capabilities of App Engine, Denone could move from idea to production in less than two months, standardize its processes globally across 120 countries, and coordinate efforts of more than 96,000 employees to achieve a single goal.

Standard Chartered

This leading financial institution, with more than 600 branches, faced backslashes in managing multiple finance processes with different focus areas. It was hard to monitor their progress, and duplicate work led to inefficiencies, creating a big hindrance in the accuracy of data. Also, employees had to put in repetitive efforts to cope with it.

However, after adapting to ServiceNow App Engine, management became an easy game for the leading bank. They created automated workflows, replacing traditional financial processes for different core areas, saving 16,800 annual hours for employees. Not only this, duplicate queries were reduced by 80%, which accelerated requests closer to 50,000+ per quarter.

Buckinghamshire Council

A government unitary authority that was made with a collaboration of five different councils, including 5000 IT users. They faced a challenge in managing critical support services through spreadsheets, leading to system slowdowns during the period of major change. To address this, the council adopted ServiceNow App Engine to create a self-service portal that unified access to resources. This empowered 75% of the council staff to seek this self-service portal as their primary point of access.

Get Started with ServiceNow App Engine

By implementing ServiceNow App Engine, you can significantly improve your business efficiency and productivity. With automated workflows and custom applications, your teams will work smarter, not harder, simplify processes, and boost productivity.

Ready to explore the benefits of ServiceNow App Engine? Cyntexa is here to help!

We offer streamlined ServiceNow consultancy to help you maximize its potential. We guide you through the process of understanding the platform and developing tailored workflows and applications that streamline your business operations.