Siemens Energy Powers Digital Transformation in Brazil with Mendix

As energy demand grows and power fluctuations increase, grid operators must adapt quickly. Siemens Energy’s power transformers are crucial in this process, adjusting voltage levels to ensure reliable, uninterrupted power supply while accelerating the transition to cleaner energy sources.

Siemens Energy has a long-standing presence in Brazil dating back to 1867. The organization has established factories in Charlotte, North Carolina, Guanajuato, Mexico, and Jundiaí, Brazil – key hubs for manufacturing large power transformers (LPTs), which are essential to supporting both traditional and renewable energy grids.

Siemens Energy’s commitment to innovation is reflected in its use of digital technologies to optimize production, including the Mendix low-code platform. With Mendix, Siemens Energy Brazil has transformed its engineering and shop floor operations, implementing tools like DigiOffice and DigiFloor to streamline processes, boost productivity, and maintain its leadership in the energy sector.

Powering Up Low-Code Development

Siemens Energy previously had a decentralized development model, where factories would develop their own software per location. This resulted in siloed data, difficulty sharing information, and a lack of real-time production insights.

In 2024, Siemens Energy announced the upcoming expansion of its Transformer Americas (TAM) with a new factory in North Carolina. This expedited the need for a new software development tool that could:

• Become the standard across different factory locations.
• Minimize development complexity, allowing teams to focus more on product development.
• Work within Siemens Energy’s stringent security requirements.
• Improve collaboration between business and development experts throughout the SDLC.

“We saw that Mendix would help our team meet these goals and more easily integrate our growing number of locations,” shared Everton Luis de Oliveira, head of engineering at Siemens Energy Brazil.

Mendix was also able to meet the cybersecurity team’s rigorous standards, meaning that users could have a central way of accessing information across the organization.

“We couldn’t do that using the old solutions like on-premises platforms,” said Luis Henrique Boiago, a software development specialist at Siemens Energy Brazil.

The abstracted nature of Mendix also made it easier for Luis Oliveira – a novice developer and product analyst – to rapidly carry out traditionally complex software development processes.

“As soon as I was able to take an object and create a workflow, I knew we could do a lot for our engineering department,” he said. “Mendix also allows us to debug rapidly, make UI improvements, and easily digitize departmental processes.”

This also makes it easier for product owners and technical experts to collaborate during development and get to the right outcomes more quickly.

Engineering Excellence with Mendix

The design and production of power transformers is an intricate and complex process that touches nearly every team at Siemens Energy Brazil. Sales gathers order requests from clients, engineering departments manage technical planning, and the commercial department analyzes contract details and payments.

Once a project’s main parameters are defined, a dedicated team produces drawings for transformers’ cores, winding, isolation, and accessories. Prior to Mendix, design data was siloed and there was no central source of truth where both real-time and historical information could be accessed.

“There was lots of duplication of information throughout the production pipeline,” Luis Oliveira shared. “The majority of this data was also stored in Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.”

Their solution was to develop the DigiOffice application with Mendix.

“The digital office follows a process and incorporates it into a larger database. Once it is completed and the outputs are generated, any other dependent processes can easily access the data,” Everton added. This makes it easier to identify areas of improvement and force validation to uphold the data quality.

DigiOffice was conceived with the goal of transforming operations across all factories. After successfully digitizing several departmental procedures and introducing changes to their cluster, the allure of a Mendix solution was quickly embraced. What started as an initial concept rapidly evolved into a full-fledged solution in just a few months.

However, the true value of DigiOffice lies in its continuous expansion. Over the following months, new modules were consistently developed and integrated, with a new solution typically being introduced every two months.

With 2 years of maturity, DigiOffice contains several modules, including:

• Process Interface Action Management (PIAM): Tracks open action items across the factory. “This begins at the offer stage, so if we have to verify something with a customer, it will mark who is responsible for gathering that information,” said Fábio Cérgoli, a senior sales analyst at Siemens Energy Brazil.
• AH Dashboard: Registers all factory workers.
• Technical Order Cleaning (TOC): Streamlines project timelines by clearing mechanical project orders.
• Project Charter: Transitions offers to execution teams and serves as a foundation for other digital tools.
• Document Management System: Manages transformer-related documents (still under development).
• Quality Gate: Monitors project milestones, ensuring each step is approved by the designated experts via DigiOffice to avoid deviations, identify potential issues ahead of time, and minimize nonconformities.
• Control Cabinet (TOCC): Houses contract details with suppliers and outlining Siemens’ requirements for suppliers to meet.
• Design Process Control: Centralizes key quality assurance processes – including over 80 technical checklists, risk assessments with mitigation actions based on risk scores, and structured design reviews across all constructive groups – to ensure Siemens Energy designs meet both internal standards and client specifications.
• Offer Management: Helps the sales department create and manage offers, integrating with engineering, logistics, purchasing, and factory planning to track status, manage documentation, and improve operational efficiency.

“In order for these engineers to really utilize a digital alternative, it had to be intuitive and simple for them to understand,” Oliveira shared.

The development team gathered feedback via Jira to identify bugs, areas for improvement, and implement any new ideas coming from the engineers. “Engaging end users is most important to make these digitalization projects a success,” shared Boiago.

Transforming Shop Floor Processes

In addition to DigiOffice, Siemens Energy Brazil developed DigiFloor, a visual management solution for factory workstations. This tool enhances data management tracked and registered by shop workers, ensuring the traceability of everything related to the production of transformers.

DigiFloor also replaced traditional data sheets, which included multiple quality checklists for several workflows. This shift resulted in an annual savings of nearly $1M in printing and distribution costs.

The Mendix application displays key information to streamline the entire factory workflow, such as:

• Planned vs. actual activities
• Quality checklists
• Assigned target goals
• QR codes for signatures and record-keeping

To ease any concerns about the new digital tool, the development team collected feedback directly from operators and factory leadership on the shop floor. They also offered comprehensive training to ensure everyone was equipped to use the Mendix application effectively.

Since its success at their power transformer facility, DigiFloor has been expanded to another on-site factory.

Building a Concrete Foundation

Siemens Energy Brazil’s Mendix applications offer a flexible framework for further development. DigiOffice and DigiFloor serve as umbrella solutions, serving as a foundation for integrating sub-processes as new modules or workspaces are added over time.

“We take a process, digitalize it separately, and then import and plug that module back into the main solution,” Everton said.

For example, a data module within DigiOffice enables teams to customize modules, create pages, and add microflows as needed without disrupting the existing architecture.

According to Boiago, all role-based permissions, tracking security parameters, and dashboards sync data automatically when these new modules are added.

Centralized Data Made Actionable with AI

Siemens Energy Brazil is leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to elevate their digitalization efforts.

The team is integrating an AI model into Snowflake’s Cortex platform to:

• Simplify data analysis in Mendix
• Manage large datasets efficiently
• Reduce traffic and infrastructure needs for developers

Mendix streamlines this process, enabling the team to work seamlessly with complex data allowing a much broader audience across the business to utilize insights.

Snowflake also powers TINA, an AI assistant for shop floor workers, offering easy access to instructions, answering questions, and providing detailed information, similar to ChatGPT. The integration is made effortless with the Snowflake connector from the Mendix Marketplace.

“Snowflake AI will help digest this information even more quickly and extract insights to improve transformer production,” Boiago explained.

Siemens Energy Brazil will also synchronize SAP with Snowflake. “If we want to consume information from SAP, we can read it directly from that Snowflake,” Boiago added. “It’s truly all connected now with Mendix.”

Energized for the Future

Siemens Energy Brazil is demonstrating how Mendix can transform manufacturing organizations during periods of business growth. By improving data management, streamlining operations, and enhancing collaboration across departments, Siemens Energy Brazil can maintain development standards as they expand.

Siemens Energy Brazil plans to enhance its digital workflow by transitioning electrical and mechanical calculations from legacy tools to cloud-based services on AWS or Azure. These calculations will be integrated into DigiOffice for real-time access, improving accuracy and optimizing operations. Looking ahead, the team aims to implement a dedicated calculations module within DigiOffice, replacing the legacy tool.

“The prospect is very nice and from what we know, Mendix can handle it. It would really revolutionize our operations even further,” Luis Oliveira said.

In addition to modernizing their landscape, Boiago aims to significantly improve data quality at Siemens Energy Brazil.

The engineering department, which deals with vast amounts of data from simulations and tools validating mechanical and electrical structures, will benefit greatly from this integration.

“Once this information is connected, we’ll be able to gather insights and identify trends that would have otherwise been impossible,” Boiago said.

Reflecting on his journey, Luis Oliveira shared the personal pride he felt in showing his family how his work with Mendix was shaping the future of manufacturing in Brazil. “It meant a lot to me that they saw how far I’ve come and how much their sacrifices have allowed me to achieve,” he said.