Yazaki Develops a Custom Scheduling Application 80% Faster with Mendix

Leading electrical distribution system (EDS) supplier Yazaki is at the forefront of the evolving automotive industry. Their products are used by most major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide. This environment tests the boundaries of traditional IT development – where solutions must adapt and flex against a backdrop of constant change.

Yazaki’s testing center in Canton, MI is a critical, value-add service organization that allows the company to run testing and root cause analysis on its products. Scheduling in the testing center is determined based on several dependencies such as available equipment, operators, and timing.

With hours of employee effort spent each week on scheduling and a lack of fit-for-purpose solutions on the market, Yazaki looked to Mendix to develop a custom scheduling application. Since launching in April 2025, the application has helped to reduce manual work, increase transparency, and improve efficiency in Yazaki’s testing center.

Shifting Gears with Low-Code

Historically, the nuances of Yazaki’s test scheduling process lived in the brain of a single team member who has worked in the testing center for 25 years. He would huddle with leaders each week in a conference room and plot out schedules with Excel sheets.

“He knows the ins and outs of scheduling, but one day he is going to leave the company, and all that tribal knowledge he has is going to go away. We had to harness that – along with all the Excel spreadsheets and everything else that we use – and take that manual process and move it forward,” said Jeffrey Malotke, a Senior Engineer in Yazaki’s Testing Center.

Initially, Yazaki looked at off-the-shelf (COTS) scheduling tools as a replacement. However, even the best tools on the market were not robust or customizable enough to meet their unique process requirements.

Fortunately, Yazaki already had the Mendix low-code development platform in their arsenal of development options. After successfully developing a Testing Portal in 2024, Malotke saw Mendix as the perfect path forward.

The benefits Mendix had offered for the Testing Portal – such as faster time-to-market, greater flexibility, and usability for non-IT team members – would be equally valuable to deliver a bespoke scheduling tool.

Bringing Clarity to Complex Scheduling

In November 2024 Malotke began working on a prototype to prove Mendix’s efficacy to solve their scheduling conundrum.

“Building the first prototype was only a week’s worth of collaboration with the Mendix Expert Services team. We were able to take a very dynamic process and put it into a scheduler, proving to our management team that this was the right direction to go,” he said.

Malotke and his colleague Tyler Knott completed the first version of the scheduler in May 2025. The application incorporates several critical processes for Yazaki:

• Training matrix integration: Historically managed in Excel, the application now integrates a detailed training matrix, ensuring project leads can see which personnel are qualified for specific tasks.
• Resource grouping: The scheduler accounts for groups of equipment, operators, and supporting equipment, allowing leads to select the appropriate group for a job. The scheduler then assigns the first available person within that group.
• Customer specification integration: The application considers sequencing from the customer’s perspective, including the order of tests and the equipment and estimated amount of time involved.
• Dependency management: The scheduler intelligently manages dependencies such as the availability of skills, people, equipment, or parts, and considers these against requested completion dates.

Previously, inquiries about project timelines involved manual checks and meetings. Now, project stakeholders have real-time access to job status, including Gantt charts, allowing them to understand scheduling factors and target completion dates.

What was estimated to be a two-year project with high code development was completed in just five months with Mendix by two non-IT team members. With low-code, their team has successfully:

• Created a bespoke solution that addresses all critical scheduling requirements.
• Integrated multiple systems into one tool.
• Increased transparency and data availability.
• Improved response time to customers.
• Established a data bed for AI to start mining critical business information.

“Imagine that a new job comes in and you want to see when it can be completed. You can just ask a chatbot and it will come back and tell you exactly who can work on it and when it’s feasible to get it done,” Malotke said of their future aspirations for AI in the scheduler.

The flexibility of Mendix allows Yazaki to respond to user feedback for future iterations beyond this initial version. Post-launch Malotke continues to experiment and make enhancements that can be turned around in an afternoon.

“I did this last week – connecting the Mendix application data to PowerBI using an OData connection. It’s something I have never done before, but I was able to learn very quickly. This was maybe one hour of work,” he said.

Accelerating the Digitalization Agenda

Yazaki sees even more areas of opportunity for Mendix going forward. Malotke is collaborating more closely with IT to position Mendix as a reliable option for larger digitalization projects.

He hopes to tackle more complex process automation cases, such as a calibration module, training matrix, and feasibility checks.

The team has already checked several priorities off their list, such as:

• Connecting Mendix with PowerBI for real-time dashboards and analysis.
• Approval to start connecting Mendix applications to AI services and the Mendix Cloud.
• Establishing mobile access for their applications to ensure that apps are available to users wherever they are.

“Anybody who has Mendix and hasn’t connected to mobile yet – I highly suggest it, especially if you’re creating workflow or approval processes. Imagine you have an executive who has to approve something high priority and they are on the beach without their laptop and all they have is a cell phone. If your app is available on mobile, they can just go in and provide an approval on the fly,” he said.

Driving Future Success at Yazaki

For Yazaki, a testing portal and scheduling application are just the beginning. “Mendix gives us an opportunity to do higher-value and more innovative work. We can reduce ‘muda,’ as we call it – the Japanese term for waste – and use our time for more productive things,” said Malotke.

Strategically, Mendix is filling a gap in Yazaki’s technology strategy as a valuable tool that can:

• Develop unique solutions for unique business challenges.
• Enhance optimization in line with business needs.
• Offer non-IT developers access to customizable tools.

Low code’s speed and accessibility promotes a ‘try, fail, learn, iterate’ approach, where the team can quickly pursue new ideas and pivot as needed. Using Mendix to become more efficient in their testing centers is helping Yazaki reaffirm its position as a dynamic, competitive figure in the automotive industry.