Scalable and Maintainable Equipment Management with SAP and Mendix
Founded in 1989, Bourne Optics is a pioneer in the global optics industry. Leveraging advanced professional technology and over 30 years of development, Bourne Optics has become one of the world’s largest, most capable, and technologically advanced manufacturers of smartphone screens.
Managing equipment using their existing ERP system forms could no longer meet the optimization and innovation requirements for equipment management due to Bourne’s business growth.
Bourne adopted the Mendix platform to develop an integrated solution leveraging low-code and SAP Plant Maintenance, laying a solid foundation for managing the full lifecycle of customer equipment assets. The new equipment management system provides customers with an electronic maintenance record database, electronic maintenance inspections, and improved operational stability.
Dynamic Changes, Perfect Timing
Adhering to the philosophy of “technological innovation, green environmental protection, and win-win cooperation,” Bourne Optics focuses on innovation and demand to provide high-quality products and services, creating significant economic and social benefits and driving rapid economic development.
Amidst intensifying competition, unpredictable international conditions, and rapid advancements in information technology, as the largest supplier of smartphone screens and optical products, the market has placed higher quality and management demands on Bourne’s equipment management.
This has brought both challenges and opportunities for upgrading its equipment management system and digital transformation. Bourne has set higher requirements for its equipment management system in areas such as data analysis, intelligent operations, maintenance, and repairs.
Innovative Solutions, Emerging Excellence
Faced with these challenges and opportunities, Mendix and its partner Nengke Technology worked closely with Bourne through multiple rounds of communication. They ultimately adopted a joint solution involving SAP PM and a mobile equipment management app developed on the Mendix platform.
“SAP and the mobile application developed on Mendix provide us with equipment business and core data management functionalities that meet the requirements for equipment master data standardization and core business management,” said Xuexue.
For customized, fragmented business needs—particularly for mobile equipment management apps—the traditional SAP secondary development approach is limited by its design framework and cannot fully meet customer requirements in terms of response speed, flexibility, and demand alignment.
Leveraging Mendix’s agility, continuous innovation, and inherent integration with SAP, the solution ensures a powerful, scalable, and maintainable system that remains flexible without compromising SAP’s core data and business integrity.
Functional Architecture Diagram
During project implementation, Bourne’s IT team had even higher expectations for Mendix and Nengke Technology.
“The custom mobile app required for this project must support equipment management for three factories while remaining scalable to manage equipment data and operations for additional factories in the future. The system must handle 700,000 to 900,000 equipment units without performance issues,” said Xuexue.
After three rounds of technical discussions and validations, Mendix and Nengke Technology delivered a satisfactory solution:
- Project Architecture: For the first time in a low-code project, the Mycat component was integrated to enable reasonable database sharding and partitioning of business data, ensuring performance in large-scale data queries and operations. With horizontal sharding, some users have tested up to 600 million rows of data. This marks the first successful domestic application of Mycat with the Siemens Mendix platform to solve such issues.
- Deployment: To ensure system stability and reliability under high concurrent access, the application was deployed using containerization platforms and related technologies such as K8S, Docker, and Nginx, combined with Mendix low-code. These platforms’ features, like automatic scaling and elastic resource allocation, effectively resolved system stability and performance issues under heavy traffic, supporting 50,000 concurrent users.
Deployment Architecture Diagram
Agility and Efficiency Achieve Success
“This project is not just an innovation in combining Mendix low-code with traditional technology components, but also a breakthrough in customer business expansion and management models,” said Ruan Yizheng, Nengke Technology’s Low-Code Platform Leader.
In traditional low-code projects, due to the lightweight nature of low-code, apps are usually deployed independently at each factory for isolated business and data management. However, this approach significantly increases implementation and maintenance costs and fails to meet unified data management requirements.
Bourne’s project demonstrated that low-code can handle high data volume and complex business scenarios while shortening implementation cycles and reducing future expansion costs.
During the project, Mendix, as the end-to-end development platform, expedited requirement clarification. Using a model canvas, requirement analysis, business planning, and modular design were completed in less than a month.
Full development was completed within eight weeks, allowing ample time for SAP integration. Thanks to the Mendix platform, Nengke Technology’s strong low-code delivery capabilities, and seamless collaboration with the SAP team, the project was delivered with high quality and received unanimous praise from Bourne’s business and IT teams.
The system integrates all equipment management stages, from master data, preventive maintenance, daily operations, fault and work order management, to maintenance, audits, transfers, and scrapping. By standardizing master data and streamlining business processes, Bourne can extend their equipment lifecycle, reduce maintenance costs, and increase profitability.