The Business Agility Blog

Time To Market: 1 Months

• A Product Data Management (PDM) tool that allows numerous parties to analyze the supply chain process
• Achieves cost savings via further analysis of work flow efficiencies
• Provides real time information for internal and external parties

Marlies Dekkers needed a solution that was user friendly and accessible by a variety of parties. It would have to facilitate the planning and production of new designs, from initial concept development to a final bill of materials. This process involves many steps and many stakeholders. The challenges involved in the project were varied but mainly centered on the required integration with prior internal systems.

Download full case study

Time To Market: 1.5 Months

• A personalized employee portal that enables data and process harmonization
• Provides real-time access to external parties
• Readiness to comply with future rules and procedures

The Dutch government passed a new healthcare policy in the Netherlands, requiring healthcare providers and insurance companies to use a new government-regulated system for the pricing of healthcare treatments. As a result, both insurance companies and healthcare providers were forced to adapt their internal processes and systems to be able to comply with a new industry-wide standard for communicating treatment definitions and their corresponding pricing structure.

Download full case study

Time To Market: 1.5 Months

• A flexible two-portal online application for Agis employees and healthcare providers to automate the tendering, delivery, management and monitoring of healthcare services
• Return on investment achieved within 6 months
• Readiness to comply with future rules and procedures

The Dutch government decided to transfer parts of its AWBZ mental healthcare program to the private insurance sector, thus creating a new healthcare system with regulated competition. To comply with the new rules, insurance companies, such as Agis, are obliged to contract healthcare providers for these hard-to-insure treatments and services. In every region, one insurer is granted a concession by the government to deliver in-kind insurance.

Download full case study

Time To Market: 6 Months

• Automation of service authorization for fleet vehicles
• Significant reduction in internal labor
• Minimized throughput time

Kwik-fit centers have to manage severe spikes in demand before and after the winter season. Over one thousand sets of tires are changed, and changed back, each year in order to combat unsafe winter driving conditions. Kwik-fit customers rely on the organization to replace their tires, making this service a top priority. Due to poor performance and the lack of an automated interface in prior applications, the organization has needed to hire between six and eight additional employees for a period of ten weeks to handle the pressure of seasonal demand spikes.

Download full case study

Time To Market: 1 Months

• A one-stop Track and Trace portal that provides real time order status updates
• Cleanly integrated data from all of the necessary parts of the supply chain
• Improved Customer Service ability to track orders

Marlies Dekkers management wanted to gain access to more data regarding the delivery process among different parties in their supply chain. Customer Support spent too much time searching the different systems when a customer called for an order status update. These systems included Navision, an excel sheet from TNT, and the UPS website – depending on which part of the supply chain the order had reached. Customers were not satisfied with Customer Support’s ability to track orders, and Customer Support did not have the right tools to acquire this information in a timely manner.

Download full case study

Time To Market: 3 Months

• Agent Portal that streamlines the submission, quoting, and binding of new business
• Reduction of manual workload in submission and underwriting process
• A user friendly front-end solution that integrates with back office systems

The primary challenge involved the submission and underwriting process, which requires a large amount of manual (duplicate) data entry – resulting in operational inefficiencies and poor reporting quality. To support their growth ambitions, FNP needed a user friendly front-end solution that would integrate with their existing back office systems (Policy Administration System and Underwriting Tool).

Download full case study

I came across this slideshow from CIO Insight a few weeks ago. The aggressive-looking deck attempts to explain why IT projects fail. I’m always a bit weary of headlines that seem this simplistic, but who knows – maybe they thought up some new ways to blow a project that millions of us hadn’t already avoided, accomplished, or observed. Better yet, wouldn’t it be something if we finally figured out how to diminish the “63 billion dollars” worth of failed projects in the US?

Clicking through the deck, I realized that a majority of these reasons are somewhat interconnected. It’s not just lack of detailed requirements, lack of user involvement, scope creep, bad scoping, poor testing, or lack of executive support. An innate segregation between the business people who use the product, the IT people who build the product, and the business analysts who dance in between – is the root cause of most of these problems.

Enhance Collaboration, Improve Requirements

The logical solution to these failure-inducing practices is visual modeling. By using visual models, both sides of the IT-Business equation have a valuable representation of what the IT project will encompass. By using this method of collaboration, requirements become more accurate. Business people can visualize the processes that the software will benefit, and IT people have a more functional way of communicating their solution.

The Immediate Feedback Loop

If we take one step further into the initial requirements analysis, these visual models can be deployed as applications for an immediate look into future checkpoints in the project. Imagine the following scenario:

Business Analyst: “So the data from your current ERP system will be aggregated and validated in the new system, which will then report directly to their corresponding contacts from your CRM.”
Client: “Right…”
Business Analyst: “Ok, well this is the model with data flows – and this is what the application will look like to the contact in the CRM system.”
Client: “Wait, that’s not all the data they’re going to need. What about integrating the grant management database?”

[A few clicks, a new form, and deploy.]

Business Analyst: “Okay, so now the window shows the corresponding grants for each contact as well.”

Isn’t immediate feedback fun!? It’s a dream for business analysts that has only recently become a reality (in the Mendix Business Modeler, that is). Mendix users never come close to failing a project because clients know exactly what they’re getting and developers know exactly what is needed. So why are so many IT projects failing? The right tools are out there, it’s only a matter of time before they are discovered.

Time To Market: 4 Months

• The application allows Arch Re to create and validate the interface to support its facultative reinsurance program contracts
• Real-time overview of bordereau, and pending tasks and activities
• Security administration

Download full case study

The idea of open source information gathering has been utilized in the scientific community for centuries. It is no secret that sharing information created by communities of experts provides the most productive basis for advancement, regardless of subject matter or field of study. Business engineers developing on the Mendix platform utilize our own MX forum and AppStore to discuss, learn, and share their thoughts for the betterment of their applications. Our Research and Development team use the forum to make the Business Agility Suite better for our users. It is, at its very heart, a cyclical philosophy that mutually benefits those who learn and those who create.

Again, the advocates for open source are vast and ever growing. The following anecdotes aim to portray our wholehearted belief in using open source in the advancement of our technology.

1. Sharing is Caring

The Mendix AppStore is a fantastic example of our own community embracing open source. Most of the content in our AppStore is open source. Our partners have been busy creating interesting software modules that can save other developers time and money. In return, they will have access to other developers applications, widgets, and themes. The AppStore is available to our partners and users now, but will be open to the public soon. Developers also share the ability to make the contents of our AppStore better, as discussed in the following…

2. Concealed knowledge is static knowledge

A century ago, intellectual property laws were all the rage. In many industries, they still serve a valid purpose that may very well foster innovation. For instance, pharmaceutical research must remain concealed in order to protect the value creation that finances it. (Then again, Andrew Witty of GlaxoSmithKline, is placing his bets on open source research to find a vaccine for malaria.) In many cases, however, when knowledge is concealed from the public eye, it remains static and unchallenged, and therefore compromised.

The often overlooked side of what makes an open source philosophy valuable is in the review of content. While creation of content by the masses demonstrates the initial benefit of open source, the ability to have innumerable judges critiquing that very content is equally valuable. Shared content is validated by peers, rather than say, the reputation of its creator. In fact, the MX Forum rates its users based on their contributions. This way, reputation is directly related to the reaction ones contributions receive.

3. Disseminating knowledge is just as important as creating it

It turns out that an open source philosophy contains within itself a similar relationship to that of the chicken and the egg. Which is more important: The supply of new knowledge, or the ability to communicate it? The Internet has given us the ability to communicate and create vast amounts of information simultaneously. Open source philosophy, as it has developed online, has become hugely more impactful as the Internet evolved into its current state. With more access to knowledge comes more knowledge, and with more knowledge comes more innovation. Again, a cyclical growth of intellect is fostered by open source.

My motivation for writing this post came about when our forum, the MX Forum, was featured on OSQA – The Open Source Question and Answer System – well, forum. This site is an interesting demonstration of open source philosophy, as it literally centralizes open source forums within its own open source forum. Since the team at Mendix applauds open source philosophy, we were happy to provide our forum to its visitors. If you’re looking for our source code, you can find it here.