The Business Agility Blog

Recap of the Mendix Essentials held at the Euromast in Rotterdam last week where Arno Rood introduced Mendix and spoke about the urgency to be agile, where Floor van Gageldonk and Ramses Schenk developed a simple app together with the audience, where Floor broke down a customer case with Eurofiber and where the audience had the opportunity to ask everything on their mind.

Managing Director of Benelux Arno Rood Introducing Mendix (in Dutch):

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about Mendix:

Questions by the audience:

Please make an appointment with our Sales Team if you have in depth questions about Mendix:

Mendix Essentials review

As our seats for the Mendix Essentials tend to run out fast, make sure to sign up quickly for the next edition on january 27.

As a marketing department we know Mendix as a whole, we know what it does, how it enhances your enterprise application landscape and what makes Mendix stand out from other Business Platforms. As you can imagine the marketing department doesn’t use the platform day to day to rapidly develop enterprise applications (6x faster!). But the lively Mendix user community do. These are the people who know Mendix inside out. We are delighted to see Mendix 3.0 made their life much better. Of course, all kudos are for the Mendix R&D department who implemented lots of clever shortcuts, options, messages and features to Mendix 3.0 based upon collected user feedback with sprintr.

Some nice new shortcuts:

• Ctrl+ G: find and go to an item
• Ctrl + Left arrow and Ctrl + Right arrow: move data grid columns, search fields, buttons, tab pages and more in the form editor
• Ctrl+Enter: Ok / Close any form in the modeler

New features:

• When the number of rows in a datagrid is set to more than 20 (e.g. 50), the grid is shown in the modeler with 20 rows and the remark (30 more rows) in the bottom left of the grid. This saves time scrolling and searching in certain forms:
• Enable and disable breakpoints without restarting.
• When duplicating documents, the duplicate is opened automatically for editing instead of accidentally editing the original form.
• “Insert new above selected” when adding an attribute. Great when you have large entities.
• Give microflow actions a background color. This is useful for complex microflows. For example:”make error handling flows red.

Thanks to Frans Verschoor for starting a great topic in the Mendix community.

Life Science organizations in the United States are facing an interesting problem as a result of the Physician Spend Sunshine Law, which requires them to report spend on Health Care Professionals (HCPs) and start collecting data for these reports by January 1^st. The law will provide transparency into the contribution of benefits to physicians and require these organizations to report spend on a yearly basis. While the law is certainly a reasonable request by the government, life sciences organizations are having a difficult time setting up the software to automate the otherwise incredibly painstaking manual task.

Your typical life science organization has a number of systems that track a huge amount of transactions, many of which are with HCPs. For the first time, these systems have to be able to talk to each other and spit out reports for Uncle Sam, who has quite a rigid and lengthy list of requirements for those reports. It’s an incredibly time consuming and error-prone process to do by hand, and unless an automated system starts collecting and validating data by the end of this year, these companies are looking at five-figure fines for each incorrectly reported transaction. Yes folks – $10,000 per row in a faulty-migrated excel sheet will get even the heavy hitters attention.

Here’s the kicker: Good old Uncle Sam isn’t exactly standing by his word when it comes to his reporting requirements for the Sunshine Act. Since the announcement was first made, we’ve already seen changes to the reporting guidelines – and we can say with a significant amount of certainty that more are expected to arise within the next few years. This means that any system in place to automate the capture of HCP aggregate spend better be able to adapt to future requirements… on a dime.

If you know about Mendix, you know that we pride ourselves on the ‘built-to-change’ characteristic of applications developed (er, *modeled*) with Mendix. We’re working with life science companies to solve this little compliance fiasco in a hurry with custom HCP aggregate spend solutions, and we’re preparing them for future changes as well.

The fun part about these projects is that most of them require almost no IT department involvement. Compliance managers and legal counsel seem to enjoy the freedom to implement a solution that supports their integration needs immediately without any need to adventure into the technical abyss.