The inaugural Impact Awards Ceremony took place at Mendix World 2019, and we’re thrilled to announce the winners. I get excited when our customers can really show value and success in their business. The Impact Awards are our way to celebrate that. Across six categories, we aimed to recognize and award companies that have changed their business in impactful ways.
The event was packed, chock full of Mendix customers and an audience eager to how businesses are transforming themselves and their markets.
Customer Experience
This category recognizes Mendix customers who have improved the experience for their customers and business partners when interacting with their organization.
The Winner: Erie Insurance
Erie Insurance’s independent agents had expressed difficulty in generating quotes. Processes were slow and business lines were sprawled across a number of legacy systems. Using low-code, Erie Insurance immediately set out to remedy their agents’ experience.
Erie consolidated processes and systems to produce a single user interface for agent quoting. The new experience significantly reduced manual work, shrinking the time to receive a quote from two days to 10 minutes. This resulted in some product lines seeing nearly a 40% increase in written premiums.
Beyond those results, Erie can now continuously evolve their quoting offering. When additional lines of business are needed, Erie can implement those quickly and fluidly, resulting in rapid responses to swiftly changing market conditions and agent needs.
Emcee Rens de Jong asked the team at Erie who worked the hardest, and what was the biggest lesson Erie learned. One Erie employee accepting the Impact Award simply said, “Learning Mendix.” Congratulations to Erie Insurance for driving meaningful impact on how their agents work.
Digital Workplace
Finalists in this category were recognized for the improvements they made to workplace operations for their employees. On stage, CEO Derek Roos described Digital workplace best before the winner was announced: Digital Workplace is “using Mendix platform to automate internal processes make the workplace a better workplace, be more efficient and happier.”
The Winner: The City of Rotterdam
The City of Rotterdam exemplifies Roos’s description. We were awestruck by all the stories submitted in this category, but nothing had us more excited than how the City of Rotterdam changed the way the city is managed and made a positive impact on the people of Rotterdam.
The City of Rotterdam’s Information Management team needed to find a way to update the processes by which their public safety officers recorded observations and made reports, and at the same time be in compliance with GDPR. Their IT team offered to build a Java solution, but it would prove too costly and take too much time.
Digital Workplace is using Mendix platform to automate internal processes make the workplace a better workplace, be more efficient and happier.
Instead, the Information Management team turned to low-code. In just 8 weeks, the Information Management organization collaborated with the IT organization to create an application that tracked, recorded, and processed reports to enforce the proper use of outdoor space in Rotterdam – a process once done through legacy applications and an Excel spreadsheet.
They were able to develop this app six times faster and saved between €120-240k in development costs. Since the application went live, The City of Rotterdam has realized savings of €160k in efficiencies per year.
Used in Rotterdam’s strategic initiative of creating “Information Centered Enforcement”, this mobile application now gives information to 300 officers in real-time allowing them to capture and report over 8400 observations. The application has not only improved the officers’ work lives but Rotterdam’s citizens’ as well. Well deserved, City of Rotterdam.
Market Impact
The Market Impact award went to the company that gave themselves a competitive advantage over others in their industry with the solutions that they developed with low-code.
Winner: PostNL
PostNL has transformed itself. They’ve moved from a traditional mail business into a logistics e-commerce provider. To do this, they needed an always-on, high-performance platform that routed customer orders through their logistical ecosystem and let them deploy changes at any time.
Using low-code, PostNL built a business-critical application that directs all package orders to the correct delivery department. The application consists of multiple microservices that address requirements like guaranteed delivery during business hours and direct routing to pick-up points based on customers’ wishes. Their application handles more than 300 orders per second and 250 million orders every year, with peaks of 2 million per day.
From the very first day the platform was launched, PostNL started saving costs. More than that, because of the microservices architecture, reusable components, and a newly implemented DevOps team, PostNL can deploy changes and meet customer demands in an unprecedented short period of time.
Congratulations to PostNL for reinventing the way they work to keep that necessary edge that allows them to stay ahead of their competitors.
de Jong asked the team what the next step was for them. Never one to rest on their laurels, PostNL replied, “Even more business features.”
Innovation
This category is for businesses that have used the Mendix low-code platform with other emerging technologies like IoT, Machine Learning or Blockchain to make possible something that previously wasn’t.
Winner: ConocoPhillips
What ConocoPhillips has built is truly game-changing.
In order to maximize the production of their best performing wells at all times, ConocoPhillips — the world’s largest independent exploration and production company – built a solution that utilizes deep learning to optimize and divert limited steam power supply. A simple UI enables field operators to make decisions quickly for 183 of ConocoPhillips’s wells, tapping into data from over 5000 production and reservoir sensors. “That’s quite some information to comprehend,” de Jong said after Conoco’s work was announced.
What’s not difficult to comprehend is that ConocoPhillips’s innovation isn’t just a technical victory for the company, it’s also inspiring as it has set a precedent across the entire company to use deep learning in their solutions. Congratulations to ConocoPhillips!
Digital Transformation
Legacy migration, digitizing manual processes, modernizing entire organizations. These are just some of the ways businesses are approaching digital transformation. With this award, we recognize companies that are positioning themselves as modern, innovative, and tech-savvy.
Winner: eXp Realty
eXp Realty, the 6th largest real estate broker in the U.S., has indeed positioned themselves as a modern, forward-thinking company. The broker – whose entire workforce is remote — has moved a critical application built on a monolith architecture over to a microservices-based one. In just over a year, the monolith will be 80% broken apart.
This great technical change has also led to a large cultural and organizational overhaul, too, as eXp has made a shift to Agile teams. Beyond IT, their remote workforce of real estate agents also experienced a change with a new agent onboarding process being reduced from 30 days to just 12.
The Mendix-built applications have allowed eXp to expand operations, grow user count, and use minimal resources while reducing time to market for new features. With less overhead costs, this means higher commissions and equity stakes, fueling growth.
For eXp, teamwork was the key to their award, and they were quick to acknowledge that on stage, sending a big thank you to the team and everyone they worked with and to their moms.
With change at every facet of the company, it’s no wonder eXp Realty was our winner for the Digital Transformation award.
Smart Application
This award went to the company that found new and compelling ways to use IoT.
Winner: Endemol Shine Group
Endemol Shine Group uses Mendix, machine learning, & AI services to optimize their live production workflows for shows such as “Big Brother”, “Master Chef”, and “Deal or No Deal”. The application drastically improves post-production efficiency by automatically recognizing and surfacing compelling moments in content to production teams, who then enrich the content for the final version. Endemol also made video searchable by using Speech to Text, Face & Object recognition, scenery detection, and IoT data.
Congratulations to Endemol Shine Group for their win and innovative new ways of producing television.
Thank you
Thank you to all of our customers who submitted stories of transformation, innovation, and digitization. It’s amazing to see how you’re changing the world and humbling to know that you’re using Mendix to do it.
For more stories of big companies making big impacts, check out our customer success stories.