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For this fifth meeting of the NoCode Series we went to meet Floriane Hibelot, Head of Revenue Operations at WeMaintain.
WeMaintain operates in every building with equipment requiring mandatory maintenance (elevators, escalators, fire systems, automatic doors etc.). Their role is to give back consideration and time to the technicians while building in parallel their own technology, hardware and software, in order to provide reliable and complete data to optimize building management.
The company was founded 5 years ago now, in 2017, and has nearly 150 employees including about 30 tech profiles. For her part, Floriane joined them 3 years ago and was able to follow a training course at the Wagon in parallel to acquire more technical knowledge.
The company is now present in 3 countries: France, England and Singapore!
When she arrived at WeMaintain, Floriane quickly realized that the Ops team lacked a common process and database to ensure effective monitoring - the latter existed only on the developers' side. This created a lot of frustration and had a negative impact on internal communication. It therefore seemed essential to establish a way to process and centralize the work of the various teams via a single database. The choice of a shared database via a sheet was made.
As time went on, logistical difficulties were also felt, especially in tracking parts, orders and deliveries: the decision was then made to transfer their database to Airtable. It then became THE operational database.
This started with their teams in France and was not supposed to last long term. But with the need to focus on the evolutions of the WeMaintain product and on external tools, this internal database ended up growing. They then switched the Airtable to Glide to allow technicians to request missing parts directly from this interface. This made their work and communication much easier.
The Glide application, dedicated to ordering spare parts, is used by all the maintenance technicians - which represents between 30 and 40 users!
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Not everything is done on NoCode at WeMaintain today, quite the contrary. A large technical team is present internally and develops all the main products: the application, the client platform, the backoffice, etc. The NoCode is therefore a complement so that the developers can concentrate on the WeMaintain product.
Finally, Salesforce is connected to the Airtable database. All business information is therefore also collected on this Airtable, which allows for a closed circle that feeds well.
The NoCode for MVPs
TheProduct team also used NoCode to create MVPs, particularly for doors and fire safety systems. When these verticals were opened, an MVP was first created in anticipation of the product being ready and the time to be scalable.
Today Airtable is still used but they aim to move away from it because the platform is now old - since it has been the same one for 3 years - and there is a lot of outdated information as well as a lack of logic that is felt.
The need for training on the Airtable tool is also an element that encourages them to leave the use of Airtable. Indeed, the team is growing and no documentation is provided internally, despite the many issues that rest on this Airtable. Mistakes are then frequently made despite the intuitive side of the tool.
Their current wish is that their different applications be linked, that everything be integrated into their core stack. The integration of an ERP is therefore currently underway at WeMaintain. This will allow a significant gain in value because more transparency will be guaranteed to customers and better stock management will be possible. The transition from NoCode to code is therefore purely linked to WeMaintain's business, which involves a product that is too complex to remain solely on NoCode.
As previously mentioned, WeMaintain now has teams in three different countries - France, England and Singapore - so they had to duplicate the initial Glide to make it accessible to all collaborators. So there is a Glide in English and a second one in French - depending on the language of the technicians - which is not optimal!
Airtable has allowed them to save time and money in terms of logistics, thanks to the implementation of the processes involved. Significant productivity gains have been achieved: 2 years ago they were processing 150 requests per month and now they can process up to 600.
However, the NoCode will always be useful for them to quickly test new products, new businesses, new features. This technology will have more of an innovation and experimentation objective for the WeMaintain of tomorrow.
Today, everyone is aware of the importance that Airtable has had in the company and of the various contributions of the tool. The Product and Tech teams have a very good understanding of NoCode, and it is recognized that it has saved them time and that its usefulness is relevant.
According to Floriane, its usefulness depends on the business. Inventory management and maintenance visits are elements of their business that imply having to go further than a stack NoCode . Doing everything on NoCode is now too limiting for the following reasons:
Some figures
50+ people using Airtable every day
+1000 daily operations on tools NoCode
WeMaintain did not intend to create an internal empire of NoCode but Floriane thinks that it would have been important to have 1 or 2 people in charge of these technologies to check and ensure the good functioning of the tool used. However, at the time, the company did not have the means to hire someone full time for this and the use of the NoCode tools had to be done with the little knowledge the teams had.
Today, the Airtable is not sufficiently supervised and documented to ensure that it functions properly in the long term.
Floriane works a lot with developers and realizes that a code culture is relevant to better understand the NoCode and the tools more quickly. With code knowledge, NoCode applications are more scalable and errors are more quickly identified and modified.
However, she believes that total expertise is not essential to work with these same tools. It is enough to have a "problem solver" mindset and the will to succeed in mastering the tools NoCode.
His biggest mistake? To have made his database with a too important lack of method.
✅ You have to be careful to always think two notches ahead:
"When I have 500 lines and 4 tabs what is it going to look like?"
"When I have to export it and integrate it somewhere else how is that going to work?"
Always think of the next move!
✅ Afterwards Floriane admits that she would have liked to pay more attention to the different views and roles of everyone on the Airtable. These should ideally have been better determined. It's too complicated today to take everything back, more rigor would have been needed from the start.
✅ Finally, taking the time to document each tab and each column in his Airtable seems more than relevant today in order to avoid wasting time in the future understanding and redoing things that were not previously documented.
According to her, it is important in NoCode, as in code, to have a system of tickets, follow-up and documentation.
Floriane tells us that she can't wait to see the evolution of tools like Glide, Airtable, Notion or Miro in the years to come because these tools are evolving very quickly.
Finally, she believes that today it is perfectly legitimate for companies to ask themselves whether they should develop in code or in NoCode. The hybrid side - code + NoCode - is very interesting according to her and will gradually gain ground, especially with the NoCode training courses that are increasingly offered.
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