#4 : Meeting with EY Fabernovel

For this 4th edition of the NoCode Series, we had the pleasure to visit EY Fabernovel and its new innovation studio NoCode Unlock. We would like to thank Baptiste Horny and his team for this warm welcome and these fascinating exchanges.

Unlock, the new innovation studio NoCode of EY Fabernovel

Founded in 2003, EY Fabernovel is a company that operates in France and internationally (USA, China, Morocco, Lebanon, Portugal). Recently acquired by EY, the company has a number of major clients such as Canal+, RATP and L'Oréal.

EY Fabernovel assists its clients in their entire digital transformation and innovation process around key historical activities such as change management and acculturation, employee skills development, marketing and media, strategic design, product design and technological development.

Just one year ago, EY Fabernovel announced the launch of a new activity: Unlock, a studio NoCode that supports its clients in all aspects of expertise NoCode. This studio is based on 3 pillars:

• Empowerment for the training and the increase in competences of the internal collaborators and customers on various topics (NoCode, CSR...).
• Innovation to unleash creative potential through the development of business applications, chatbots and automation.
• Communication device that includes the creation of landing pages, institutional sites and e-commerce sites.

👨💻 Focus on Baptiste Horny

Baptiste is a business school graduate. He joined EY Fabernovel 5 years ago as a Project Manager, where he automated many internal and external processes. Then he had a more transverse role in operations for 2 years. After noticing the recent effervescence of the NoCode technologies with successive and record-breaking fund-raising by the editors and the recurrent requests from EY Fabernovel clients for use cases NoCode, Baptise initiated the creation of the NoCode Unlock studio with François Truong.

‍

A multi-technology vision NoCode to serve the needs of key accounts

Thanks to its experience, the Unlock team is tool agnostic NoCode and has a global multi-technology expertise. The team is composed of 5 full-time employees and benefits from the help of several experts who intervene punctually on 3 types of use cases:

• The creation of internal websites or applications for EY Fabernovel: the new Fabernovel website was designed with Webflow. A mobile application of challenges developed in 2 days on Glide was also launched internally.
• The creation of applications or automations NoCode for projects entirely managed by the Unlock studio: a voting application during a hackathon was notably deployed on Glide for a luxury brand or a campaign tracking tool for marketing teams for a large beverage brand.
• The contribution NoCode to broader projects of EY Fabernovel, in connection with other teams of the company. Among these projects, Unlock has notably implemented a complex business tool for the sales representatives of a network of car dealerships, or the website of a political party during the presidential campaigns.

‍

‍

The main tools NoCode used by the Unlock team are : Webflow, Airtable, Wordpress, Glide, Softr, Weweb... the Unlock team keeps a regular watch on NoCode technologies and regularly invites editors to discover the capacities and possibilities offered by the tools.

As they mainly support large accounts on NoCode projects, security and RGPD issues are regularly raised and many tools NoCode do not yet (to date) allow to answer all the problems.

Code and NoCode are and will always be complementary

We asked Baptiste about his vision of NoCode in the context of Unlock's activities.

According to Baptiste, NoCode is part of a new stage in the democratization of computing. Today, advanced tools and a mature ecosystem allow the movement to take its full scope. Fundraising has multiplied in 2021 and is installing new giants in the digital landscape.

Is NoCode scalable?

According to Baptiste, it depends on the use case, but in the vast majority of cases, yes. When the conditions of alignment between the use case and the technology NoCode are met, then it is perfectly possible to scale an application, as the technologies NoCode have reached a sufficient stage of maturity. If the technology is not the most suitable for the use case, then limitations can quickly appear.

NoCode or LowCode ?

For the Unlock team, the answer is clear: the story goes more towards NoCode and Baptiste prefers to talk about NoCode + Code in the context of Unlock's activities, i.e. using the best of NoCode and pushing its possibilities while mobilizing the capacity of the developers if needed. Within the Fabernovel group, 1/3 of the employees are developers, which offers flexibility in the collaboration of the NoCode and Code teams.

Can anyone do NoCode ?

In fact, yes, but according to Baptiste, this is not for everyone. You have to want to do it, and that means evangelizing the potential of NoCode to your employees so that they can express their willingness to go further (or not).

Moreover, some tools are easier to learn than others, some are more tech-friendly. For example, getting started with Glide will be easier and faster than getting started with Bubble. The employees who turn to Bubble are experienced employees who are interested in Bubble: it's above all a conscious choice.

According to Baptiste, to use the full potential of Bubble, it is preferable to have a background in development.

In the case of Webflow, some of EY Fabernovel's UX/UI designers have taken the plunge and are using Webflow in addition to their creations to integrate and develop their sites. For Marine, a senior designer working on Unlock missions, Webflow makes it easy to hand over to the client - because it's easy to learn.

You use technologies NoCode like Webflow, Airtable, Softr, Zapier... What about Enterprise technologies like Outsystems, Mendix and Microsoft Power Apps for example?

The team is constantly on the lookout for new technologies NoCode and in particular Microsoft Power Apps, already used by some of EY Fabernovel's clients. However, the studio does not intend to use technologies such as Outsystems or Mendix because, according to Baptiste, they are aimed more at developers. Unlock does not aim to become a technology integrator but remains an innovation studio advocating NoCode and the empowerment of employees.

Will NoCode replace the Code?

Very often, the Unlock teams have very open exchanges with traditional developers. For Baptiste, the NoCode will not replace the Code, quite the contrary. Developers bring a real added value in projects NoCode when the limits of the tools are reached. Also, NoCode does not meet all the use cases. The complementarity is real. NoCode breaks down silos and communication with the tech teams.

And of course, without Code, there is no technology NoCode.

In addition, there is a great deal of mutual support between the NoCode Unlock studio and the EY Fabernovel development teams. Concretely, when the Unlock team develops a project in NoCode and the need to integrate a custom functionality (which is not available) is felt, the internal developers can bring their support, as well as for a marketing or design need. The strength of the Unlock studio is to be able to count on a set of talents answering all the skills of the innovation sector.

A growing NoCode culture

The NoCode culture at EY Fabernovel is growing day by day and the team is carrying out several actions to spread and strengthen this culture:

• Presentations of the ecosystem have been made to raise awareness of NoCode.
• An internal training course was created to introduce employees to the various tools NoCode.
• The cross-team projects NoCode and Tech allow traditional developers and project managers to become familiar with the possibilities offered by the technologies NoCode.

Within the Unlock studio, the profiles have various backgrounds: some of them joined the studio with a tech experience, others have done bootcamps like Le Wagon or some already knew the tools NoCode following past experiences.

All the members of the Unlock team touch and are trained in all the tools with varying degrees of expertise depending on the collaborators. The objective, within the team, is to master all of their stack tools and to be able to meet all of their customers' needs.

In view of Unlock's multi-technology activity NoCode , the studio's collaborators are recruited on a double competence: the expertise NoCode multi-stack and project management.

Thus, the studio has not siloed its activities around poles of technical expertise NoCode (as for example a business unit on Bubble, another on Make...) but a culture of tools to meet a multitude of needs.

For more information...

Since 1 year, about 40 projects have been implemented at Unlock: about 5 internal projects and 35 projects for customers.

Concerning the long term objectives in 5 years, Unlock's ambition is to maintain the growth and discover new tools NoCode for their customers. Unlock wishes to keep its agnostic positioning and to spread the NoCode within large companies. This implies the recruitment of new collaborators and the increase of experience on new technologies.