We’re considering using ready-to-use templates as a starting point for our BPM migration. The pitch is that we save time by not building everything from scratch. But looking at our workflow portfolio, I’m not sure how much of a time savings that actually is.
Our workflows are pretty heterogeneous. Yes, we have some standard processes like invoice approval or employee onboarding, but they all have local variations. Different approval chains depending on the cost center, different data requirements depending on the region, different integration points depending on which of our legacy systems is involved.
I’m worried that templates will give us maybe 20-30% of a working workflow, and then we spend the same amount of time customizing them as we would building from scratch. Plus we have to learn what the template is actually doing before we modify it. Is that a net win?
Has anyone actually measured the time difference between starting with a template versus starting from scratch? Or does the time savings mostly come from situations where you can actually use the template as-is?
This is exactly what we found. Templates were useful for maybe 30% of our workflow inventory—the truly generic stuff that doesn’t have much variation.
For everything else, we spent so much time understanding the template and then modifying it that we might have been faster starting fresh. The issue was that templates embedded assumptions about data structure, system integration, and error handling that didn’t match our environment.
What actually worked better was templates as reference implementations. We used them to learn the platform’s patterns and best practices, not as starting points for actual work. That was more valuable to us than trying to force-fit templates into workflows that needed customization.
If you have a true template candidate—something that needs almost zero modification—then yeah, you save time. But if you’re going into customization mode, you’re probably wasting time trying to understand someone else’s assumptions before you can change them.
The value of templates depends entirely on how standardized your workflows actually are. We have maybe 12 out of 40 workflows that ran mostly standard. Those templates saved us probably 40-50% development time. The other 28? Not at all.
What I’d suggest is do an audit of your workflow portfolio first. Categorize by how much variation exists. If you’ve got less than 25% of workflows that are truly generic, templates probably aren’t going to move the needle much on your migration timeline. If you’ve got 50%+ that are standardized, templates become more worthwhile.
We used templates as a way to onboard the team to the new platform’s patterns, but we never shipped a workflow directly from a template without significant rework. The time savings came from not having to figure out the platform from scratch, not from using pre-built workflows as-is.
templates saved maybe 25% time for us. but thats only for workflows that are actually standard. if youre customizing anyway, might be faster to build fresh.
We’ve used templates quite a bit for migrations, and the time savings are real—but only when you’re strategic about it.
Here’s what we actually found: templates work best as acceleration points for common patterns, not as finished solutions. With Latenode’s template library, the templates are built with a lot of flexibility built in. They’re not one-size-fits-all. They’re built to be customized.
What saved us the most time wasn’t using templates as-is. It was being able to spin up a structured starting point in hours instead of days, then customize the parts we needed to change. That’s different from building everything from scratch—you’re not starting from a blank canvas, you’re refinishing a piece that already has the right structure.
For workflows that needed significant variation, templates gave us patterns. For workflows that were mostly standard, templates saved us 50% or more of development time. Portfolio-wide, we probably saved about 30-35% on development effort.
The key difference with Latenode was that the templates were modular and well-documented. Took maybe an hour to understand the structure before customizing. That made the time math work out better than I expected.