Mendix World is an annual celebration of the work that the low-code make community is doing. Part of that celebration is the Customer Impact Awards, where we recognize some of the most transformative low-code work being done by Mendix customers.
As reported in Gartner’s 2021 Market Guide For Digital Business Agencies, Consulting And Implementation Services, “through 2024, organizations will bring forward digital business transformation plans by at least five years to survive and get ahead in a post-COVID-19 world focused on agility and digital touchpoints.” Gartner has highlighted the need to embrace digital transformation as a strategy for delivering new products and services, finding operational efficiency, or improving customer experiences.
With that, we are pleased to announce the finalists in our Digital Transformation category. Read more about their work below, and don’t forget to register for Mendix World to find out the winners!
The Customer Impact Awards
In 2020 you showed us some of your best work – from helping citizens access critical financial aid to ensuring safer travel for passengers – and we want to celebrate how our customers’ businesses continue to evolve and grow. From team leaders to individual contributors, the Customer Impact Awards provide a chance to reflect on the great work you’ve been doing and show the rest of the world how you are making an impact with low-code.
The submissions were incredible! From an organization that manufactures powertrain technologies for a cleaner future that migrated 17 business-critical applications using Mendix, to a waste management organization that said goodbye to spreadsheets in favor of low-code technology. This outlines the power of using low-code to digitally transform your business.
Without further ado…
Introducing the Customer Impact Awards 2021 Digital Transformation Finalists!
Brighton & Hove City Council Improves Citizen Experiences and Optimizes Internal Processes
First up, we have Brighton & Hove City Council, the local authority for the city of Brighton and Hove located in South East England. They provide a full range of services for their citizens, from tax billing to waste disposal. Previously, these services required citizens to download and print forms to then be sent back to the Brighton & Hove City Council offices. Additionally, the systems that managed the services for the council were not connected. Data about the citizens, like names and addresses, were housed in individual silos. Anytime the citizens interacted with Brighton & Hove City Council, they were required to resubmit their information. As Trevor Lee, IT&D Service Manager, explains, this required “swivel-chair processing across the organization” – meaning that government employees had to reenter the same data across different systems.
Working with the IT&D Digital Development & Data Teams, Lee set out to create a seamless digital experience for Brighton and Hove’s citizens when they request city services. They built “MyAccount,” a platform that provides residents access to a single login to view and transact with all council services online. Taking just 6 months to build the online platform, Lee and the teams created a key component to their platform: Customer Index, which acts as the golden record of their citizens. With MyAccount, residents can seamlessly access services without having to re-enter their information. Users can now engage with the Brighton & Hove City Council in a single place, rather than having to search for the relevant service in addition to finding the relevant documents. MyAccount has provided new integrations with different services, simplifying the process of working with the council.
K-Electric Optimizes Energy Efficiency for Their 3.3 Million Customers
Next, we’d like to introduce K-Electric, which is the sole power provider to one of the most populous cities in the world, Karachi in Pakistan. They are the only vertically integrated power utility in Pakistan, managing all three key areas of energy: generation, transmission, and distribution for a customer base of over 3 million accounts. To deliver power to their millions of customers, K-Electric leverages a complex network of information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT). Due to a network barrier, these systems were not communicating with each other. This meant a lack of real-time data as well as response delays from their field workers. To solve these issues, K-Electric had to remove this network barrier and enable communication between their systems.
The IT Strategy and Innovation teams concluded that they needed to create a company-wide digital environment driven by data. Using Mendix and partnering with Avertra, they built an application in just over 3 months that enables communication between their OT, including SCADA systems and sensors, and their IT solutions, which includes reporting tools and work scheduling. Another function includes energy audits, which provide recommendations to replace or eliminate equipment to optimize energy consumption. In a month, only a handful of the 30,000 customers who could benefit from this optimization were engaged. Now, 65% more customers are being audited, driving significantly greater revenues. Additionally, their customers are seeing reduced costs and increased energy savings due to the efficiency gains that K-Electric realized.
Medtronic Improves Their Regulatory Compliance Process
Up next we have Medtronic, a medical device company that operates in 140 countries and employs over 105,00 people. As an international organization, they are required by law to comply with regulations that may be unique to each country they are selling medical devices to. This creates a complex network of compliance regulations, depending on the device as well as the country it is being sent to. Previously, Medtronic had a system and processes in place to comply with these regulations, which required the use of several disparate systems, running reports to determine data elements such as language requirements or CE legislation status, as well as other activities that are specific to the country they are shipping to. This included manual work from multiple people throughout their regulatory teams to ensure that they complied.
The Program Manager at Medtronic worked with their team to identify areas to digitally transform their business to increase speed, efficiency, and accuracy of getting the right medical device to the right customer at the right time, all while maintaining compliance. In just 3 months they created a Product Shipment Release Authorization (PSRA) Process on the Mendix platform to automate tasks that ensure regulatory requirements have been met before shipping medical devices to customers. This has created efficiencies and increased accuracy by pulling data from the company database, adding logic for determining which documents are required for which countries, and automating workflows for notifications and approvals. The PSRA form now includes more data elements than the previous solution, which eliminates the need for running additional reports and helps to ensure country-specific requirements are met. Filling out the new form is about 50% faster, and the processing time is 30% faster due to the elimination of the need for additional reports.
VDL Nedcar Digitizes Automobile Production Processes
Finally, we have VDL Nedcar, the only Dutch independent car manufacturer and the largest automotive factory in the Netherlands. After being acquired by Dutch industrial conglomerate VDL Groep, VDL Nedcar quadrupled its company size in just 4 years. This created an enormous need for new application development.
Pepijn Timmermans, Vice President Digitalization, and Wil Op Den Kamp, IT Manager at VDL Nedcar, worked with Appronto to build an ecosystem of applications that support the production processes of the vehicles they manufacture. One of the applications, a sophisticated planning tool for their 5,000 production employees, digitized their communication regarding automobiles on the production belt. The team has delivered more accurate communication about the production process, paving the way for future digitization.
Congratulations to the Customer Impact Awards 2021 Digital Transformation Finalists!
Don’t forget to register for Mendix world using the link below to find out who will be crowned champion. We hope to see you there!
This blog post is part of a series. Be sure to check out the other Customer Impact Award finalists to see the incredible work our customers are doing: