For many manufacturers, standardization is the key to efficiency. For Sunon Global, it’s the opposite.

As one of China’s leading office furniture manufacturers, Sunon operates in a world of customization. Every customer has different requirements, every space presents unique challenges, and every project can involve hundreds of variables from pricing and design to manufacturing and delivery.

That complexity helps differentiate Sunon in the market, but it also creates operational challenges at scale.

At the same time, Sunon saw artificial intelligence beginning to reshape industries around the world.

“Artificial intelligence is an enhanced version of the third industrial revolution. It can even be said to be the fourth industrial revolution,” said Xiujiang Zhao, Deputy General Manager and CIO at Sunon.

The opportunity was clear. The path forward was less so.

Sunon had valuable expertise spread across the organization, but much of it was locked inside disconnected systems, shared drives, documents, and individual teams. Before the company could become an AI-powered enterprise, it first needed to connect its information and make that knowledge accessible.

Connecting the Business Before Scaling AI

The very factors that made Sunon successful also made digital transformation more difficult.

“Office furniture is highly customized, with small batches and multiple variations, making efficiency and pricing very challenging,” Zhao explained.

Designers often spent days creating office layouts. Teams reviewing tender opportunities worked through hundreds of pages of documentation to determine whether a project was worth pursuing. Non-standard pricing required specialized knowledge and manual effort.

Across the organization, employees were frequently spending more time searching for information than acting on it.

The company realized its next challenge wasn’t an AI challenge, it was a data challenge. Before it could scale intelligence across the organization, it needed a foundation that could unify information, connect systems, and make expertise accessible.

Sunon selected Mendix as the platform to help bring that vision to life. Rather than building isolated applications for individual departments, the company established a unified business platform that connects systems, people, data, and AI capabilities in one environment.

“Mendix provides standard components and integration capabilities that allow us to build applications very quickly,” said Zhu Zhifei, Sunon’s big data department manager.

That speed quickly changed how the organization approached innovation.

Using Mendix’s reusable components and integration capabilities, roughly 60 people contribute to development initiatives on the platform today.

The company also gained greater control over governance and security.

“With Mendix, integration and permission control are much simpler than with third-party platforms,” Zhifei said.

Turning AI Into Measurable Business Value

Rather than pursuing ambitious projects, Sunon focused on solving everyday business problems.

The first opportunities emerged around knowledge sharing.

Sales teams and dealers often needed quick answers about products, pricing, and configurations. Finding that information could require searching through multiple systems and documents. To solve this, Sunon built an AI-powered assistant in one week that is connected to a centralized knowledge base.

“Now, we can quickly answer customer questions about products, pricing, and recommendations,” Zhifei explained.

The company soon applied the same approach elsewhere.

Design teams have seen similar gains. AI-assisted tools generate layouts and visualizations from customer floor plans, reducing work that previously took up to a week. Contract-review assistants help identify risks before legal escalation, while other solutions support pricing and manufacturing quality inspections.

“The goal isn’t simply automation,” Zhifei said. “It’s making expertise available instantly, wherever it’s needed.”

Building a Culture of Innovation

Sunon’s success with AI has been driven by more than technology alone. From the beginning, the company approached transformation as a partnership between business and IT, ensuring that developers worked closely with business stakeholders to identify opportunities and quickly translate ideas into working solutions.

That philosophy also shaped the company’s approach to talent development. As adoption of Mendix grew, teams were encouraged to become more closely connected to the business processes they supported.

The result was a growing community of “business-aware developers” capable of bridging the gap between operational needs and technology solutions.

To accelerate delivery even further, Sunon built reusable components and patterns that could be applied across projects. Each application became an opportunity to capture knowledge, create templates, and establish best practices that could be leveraged by future AI initiatives. Now, new solutions can be delivered faster while maintaining consistency across the organization.

User adoption has been equally important. Sunon prioritized intuitive, mobile-first experiences that make AI capabilities easily accessible to employees and dealers. By embedding intelligence directly into familiar workflows, the company has been able to drive engagement while ensuring that new solutions deliver value from day one.

Accelerating Transformation at Scale

As new applications were introduced at Sunon, one principle remained constant: AI is only as effective as the data behind it.

“Data quality is critical. When data is structured, AI becomes faster and more accurate,” Zhifei highlighted.

Sunon invested heavily in creating standardized, governed data foundations that support intelligent applications across the business. That work is now enabling the company to expand into next-generation decision support capabilities.

The advice Sunon gives other organizations is surprisingly simple.

For Sunon, those small wins have added up to something much larger. By combining Mendix and AI, Sunon has accelerated innovation, scaled expertise across the organization, and reduced transformation timelines by 73%.

The result isn’t just faster solution delivery. It’s a new operating model where intelligence is embedded directly into the workflows that drive the business every day.