USI Accelerates Development and Enables Process Transformation at Scale

For leading electronics manufacturer USI, managing operations for 22,000 employees and 30 productions sites around the world requires modern and scalable technology. Historically, a lack of development standardization and aging systems have hindered employee experience and efficiency.

To address the technology of the past and create a sustainable development culture for the future, USI began evaluating low-code development platforms in 2023. They ultimately selected Mendix as their dedicated low-code partner and began laying a foundation for success with the right team and processes.

Today, USI has successfully rolled out their first Mendix project, USI Connect, which contains 70+ approval workflows across various production sites. The introduction of low-code isn’t just a platform decision, but one that is changing the development culture within USI and setting the stage for process transformation on a global scale.

Leaving Legacy Behind

Software development in USI was historically done with traditional programming, like Java, and in a waterfall way. Off-the-shelf solutions were sometimes purchased to cover niche use cases. In both cases, development and deployment were decentralized and non-standardized from site to site.

“The main challenges we faced were scalability and maintainability,” said Rubinder Chadda, Head of Corporate IT Applications within USI.

“Some of these applications were very old and were developed primarily for one region to use. We had similar applications that were distributed to different plants, and cases where people had to have multiple passwords for multiple systems, which was a frustration for our end-users. From an IT standpoint, it was not maintainable to repeat the same work several times in several different applications,” he continued.

USI needed a new approach in the next phase of their business, where global consistency and collaboration would be paramount for their growth. They began looking at low-code platforms to bring agility and flexibility back into development.

After evaluating several category leaders and running a proof-of-concept (POC), USI selected Mendix in 2023. “There are a lot of reasons why we chose Mendix,” said Timmy Shum, CIO at USI.

Technically, Mendix stood out for its functionality including:

• Cloud-native capabilities that could meet USI’s multi-cloud deployment setup (on-premise for production applications and Amazon EKS or Alibaba Cloud for office applications).
• Strong multi-lingual support so that USI could adapt solutions globally more readily.
• Collaboration tools and a powerful IDE that could be used by both professional developers and business technologists, allowinging more team members to contribute to transformation projects.

The USI team pressure-tested three applications during their POC phase: an approval workflow, material planning, and a finance use case.

“The exercise was quite meaningful, because at the time the team was skeptical. They were skeptical about low-code and skeptical about how to create value with an Agile approach, because they were so used to waterfall,” said Shum.

“These POCs got the teams working together. Mendix was very passionate about making them a success, and our team shifted from wondering why towards figuring out how to put the right support in place to make it a success.”

Centralized & Optimized Approval Workflows

USI’s first and flagship Mendix project was replacing a suite of legacy workflow applications called Global OA.

Global OA was a collection of ten 15-year-old systems being used across 30 plants. The goal was to replace these with a centralized and modern Mendix application called USI Connect. “Global OA was deployed distributedly and developed using high code, making it challenging to maintain,” said Chadda.

It presented several challenges that hindered productivity:

• Out-of-Service: Certain functionality was only available in Internet Explorer, which reached end-of-life in 2022, leaving gaps in the user experience.
• Decentralized and Distributed: As Global OA was not just one system, users had to navigate several logins and spaces to submit approvals.
• Rigid and Monolithic: Making updates to the aging and disparate system was nearly impossible and time-consuming for IT, meaning that there was no opportunity to make the experience more modern and user-friendly over time.

“This is a workflow system that every employee uses to populate forms and then managers will approve them. The goal was to create a centralized platform for them, so they could go to one place to request and approve,” said Elma Chang, Delivery Manager at USI.

Global OA contained hundreds of workflows which Chang and the team had to audit, optimize, and migrate. In just 8 months, her team had re-created 70 workflows in the new USI Connect application.

In this instance, Mendix Workflow served as an accelerator in the development of USI Connect.

The cross-functional experience of developing USI Connect had a significant impact on the working culture of the business and IT teams. The project exposed many business departments to low-code development and the Agile processes, showing them firsthand benefits of these new ways of working.

For IT, it was an invaluable opportunity to better understand business users – their processes, challenges, and needs – in a short timeframe.

“USI Connect is quite special because for me, 70 workflows meant 70 different business models and teams to better understand. We aren’t building a system just for one team, but we’re collaborating with 70 groups across Taiwan, China, and even Mexico. We weren’t just acting as IT. We had to learn their terms and skills,” said Chang.

USI Connect went live with its first workflows in September 2024 and offers several improvements:

• User Experience: The new UI meets USI’s design standards and provides a more modern experience with features such as single sign-on.
• Centralized and Integrated: USI Connect is a single system – meaning only one destination and one login for users. Furthermore, it is integrated with site-specific SAP instances, MES, and HR systems ensuring that data is always reflected accurately across systems.
• Flexible and Scalable: Developed as microservices, the team can more readily optimize the individual workflows within USI Connect without dependencies or rework. Having multi-language capabilities in Mendix also allows USI to readily scale the application to new countries over time.

Foundations for Low-Code Success

For USI, low-code development is not just a tool to solve a singular challenge. For Shum and the team, it is an investment in the longevity of their business.

Shum describes the rollout of Mendix in 3 phases:

• Starting with the right project, USI Connect, to improve and automate approval processes and solve a pervasive legacy system challenge.
• Scaling Mendix as a global development standard and cross-pollinating low-code across regions.
• Better connecting their PLM, MES, and ERP systems – and enhancing them – while keeping the core clean.

“The last stage is quite bold. My wish is to look at our three main platforms and see if it is possible to link those more tightly with Mendix. On the other hand, we can also create opportunities with Mendix to disrupt these platforms in a meaningful way and bring them onto the Mendix platform,” said Shum.

As USI progresses in this journey, they have outlined some of the keys to their initial success:

• Project Selection: Conducting a variety of POCs to sway the skeptics and picking the right first development project to build momentum between both business and IT teams.
• Investing in People: Assembling a strong team, relying on experts for support, and establishing a Center of Excellence (COE) early. These decisions will enable USI to better achieve their vision for enabling citizen developers or business technologists around the world.
• Develop for Scale: While it can be tempting to jump in headfirst, establishing standards for deployment, design, security, and reuse are worthy investments that will make future Mendix application developments run faster and more smoothly.
• Adapt Your Processes: The USI team stresses that Mendix and Agile go hand-in-hand. While there can be a learning curve, it is necessary to achieve the maximum benefits of a low-code platform.

Elma Chang’s team initially consisted of four developers and has already grown to 20 people. The COE team is a mix of developers along with a UI expert, product owners, SCRUM masters, and a solution architect.

In order to accelerate their low-code learning, the USI team brought on Mendix Expert Services to implement best practices and teach through co-development.

“We worked with Mendix Expert Services for three months and we learned a lot. Not just Mendix platform skills – but they taught us about the Agile methodology, establishing the right governance model, and setting development standards. They improved our Mendix skills and guided us through the entire process,” said Chang.

USI has also invested heavily in documentation and enablement for new Mendix team members. They have developed a knowledgebase that covers everything from governance guidelines to creating a private cloud cluster. Having their standards defined will be critical as the team begins enabling more business technologists within the organization.

Developing for the Future

Today, USI has successfully rolled out a flagship application with USI Connect and is setting their team up for future success.

“A particular part of this exercise is about our next generations. The Mendix team that we have is young… With their curiosity, passion, and can-do attitudes, this gives us a boost in our low-code journey, and I am very proud of the job that they are doing,” said Shum.

The team’s priorities in the next year include:

• Tackling additional use cases – such as forecast, shipping, and equipment management.
• Further developing USI Connect to incorporate local approvals in the app.
• Empowering business technologists to contribute to smaller, local development projects.
• Experimenting with Mendix and pushing the boundaries with generative AI.

There is a new superstar in Mendix right now called MAIA – the new AI assistant. My team has tried it and we’re really looking forward to how that evolves. We want to see MAIA help us general microflows automatically if given the right directions or generate test scripts. These are areas that will speed up our development tremendously,” said Chang.

USI has a clear vision – “to connect everything and empower everyone” – and Mendix is a key investment in this journey. Their team sees Mendix as a means to better connect and enhance their core processes.