Web-Based Customer Portal

A web-based portal is a great digital tool to deliver self-service experience. Customers can perform routine tasks like finding services, paying bills, getting a quote, and more without actually having to talk to you! For the companies, portals are a cost-effective way to provide consistent customer experience and add new revenue streams. Despite the value, a lot of companies struggle to launch a customer portal. Traditional development is slow and resource-consuming, while commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions aren’t differentiated enough to meet your unique needs.

Low-code solves these pain points by allowing developers in business and IT to collaborate and deliver customer portals—with consumer-grade UI—in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional development. Further, companies can build the interface once and reuse it multiple times for different purposes and devices.

Suez, a waste management company, used the Mendix Platform to build an eCommerce portal for its customers.

Core Systems

With a modern core system, companies can move quickly to meet their customers’ and employees’ preferences, adapt to new business conditions, and scale easily as the business grows.

Companies often think there are only two options when it comes to building modern core systems.

• Option 1: Invest in the latest Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and then invest some more in customizing it.
• Option 2: Substantially update or rebuild their existing legacy systems in-house with traditional coding. Both options are costly, time-consuming, require skilled resources, and are developed in an IT silo — risking business failure. But, there’s a third option: low-code.

Low-code applies a collaborative, agile methodology to the full application lifecycle. This approach ensures business and IT work together to reduce the risk of a failed project and deliver mission-critical apps in record time. Apps built on matured low-code platforms are cloud native and multi-cloud portable by default. Built on a modern microservice architecture, these apps scale easily, are highly secure, and enjoy maximum uptime with mission-critical resiliency.

Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) built its Core Lending System, a mission-critical use case, on Mendix.

B2C Mobile App

Investing in new digital self-service experiences like mobile apps can greatly enhance customer satisfaction and also add new business revenue. Often, the lack of skilled resources and the need to build versions for different mobile architectures keep companies away from developing mobile apps. But what if you can use low-code to build best-of-breed apps that are either downloaded from an app store or run in the browser without incurring additional costs?

Low-code makes it easy for companies to build fit-for-purpose mobile apps from a single platform, with your existing employees. Matured low-code platforms leverage the ReactNative framework to build native apps for Android and iOS quickly.

VGZ Cooperative, an insurance provider, built a mobile app for its customers on the Mendix Platform.

Monoliths to Microservices

With 62% of companies either using or planning to use microservices, there is a clear preference. Microservices are IT components that are built around business capabilities. They run independently, but are loosely coupled, and are independently deployable. When implemented correctly, microservices improve the company’s time-to-market for new functionalities and updates and promote cross-functional (BizDevOps) collaboration. But breaking down a monolith into microservices is complex, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

Low-code platforms can help phase out monoliths faster. Companies can use low-code to expedite the development of transactional microservices applications. Starting with low-risk, high-impact functionalities, companies can use APIs to re-architect monolithic apps into low-code-based microservices. Organizations are even exploring the use of low-code to expose information from legacy databases like Oracle (known as “master data microservices”).

eXp Realty, a real-estate firm, rebuilt their monolithic mission-critical app as a microservices-based solution using Mendix.

New SaaS Applications

Many companies core offerings to their customers are either physical products, services, or a combination of both. But in today’s digital-first environment, every company is in the business of software. So imagine leveraging years of industry and customer knowledge to build a new SaaS application that not only enhances core products or service offerings, but can be sold commercially (as an add-on or standalone software solution). Sounds exciting, right?! The new SaaS app can solve the most common pain points customers face. They can open up new revenue streams for the company and also help capture new markets.

We understand that building a new SaaS app is always intimidating; low-code makes it possible to quickly and efficiently build, test, and roll out the app. The collaborative nature of the platform ensures you get constant feedback directly from your end-users. Compared to traditional development, low-code offers better speed-to-market, significant cost savings, and a perfect environment to experiment with new apps.

Kermit, an innovative healthcare organization, used the Mendix Platform to build a spend management platform.

Mobile-First Supplier Portal

A company’s supply chain should operate like a well-oiled machine to deliver quality products to consumers. But, peel off a layer and you’re exposed to a messy web of spreadsheets, disparate systems, inaccurate data, and highly manual processes to manage suppliers.

A web-based supplier portal offers a good solution to these common supply chain inefficiencies. However, the web-based portal falls short for activities that need immediate reporting from field locations. For instance, an operator counting the contents of the latest raw material shipment would prefer to key in the stock count on a mobile app rather than go back to the office and launch the portal on a computer. Or, use the phone camera to scan the QR code of a faulty product batch to register the defect in the core system automatically.

By centralizing the entire application lifecycle, low-code platforms make it easy to build a mobile-first supplier portal for iOS and Android with a consumer-grade UI. Alternatively, companies can also build browser-based PWA. High reusability of components ensures companies can reuse the supplier app’s components to spin off other adjacent apps such as an eCommerce portal.

The Dutch wallet maker, Secrid, built a mobile supplier portal on the Mendix low-code platform.

IoT-Enabled Smart App

IoT-enabled business solutions increase internal operational efficiency, and enhance customer engagement. As organizations learn about the benefits of IoT, they’re actively looking for ways to deliver new IoT-enabled functionalities.

IoT apps are complex. They require integration between many disparate systems, starting with IoT endpoints such as sensors, communication devices, cars, etc. to collect data. This data by itself doesn’t hold much value. IoT software—offered by platforms like Mindsphere, IBM Watson IoT, and AWS IoT—process and analyze data from the endpoints. They also provide APIs to consume and expose IoT services.

Using low-code, existing developers can seamlessly integrate with IoT platforms to build web or mobile apps that turn the IoT data into context-aware, actionable insights for end-user consumption. Further, they can easily integrate the IoT app with enterprise systems and third-party services like weather or traffic to provide more insight or trigger physical action like turn on the AC when the weather reaches a certain temperature.

Hortilux, a world-leading provider of grow light systems, used Mendix low-code to build IoT-enabled apps.

Budget Request and Approval App

Paper or spreadsheet-based processes for budget approval are error prone, time consuming, and lack transparency. Processes built on legacy systems like IBM Notes, Domino, Oracle, etc. present their own set of problems. The user interface is complex—typically with a form asking for a lot of information, making it smartphone-or-tablet-unfriendly. On the backend, it’s difficult for IT to rapidly update the system to accommodate any new business changes in the process or to scale it as the number of users grows.

Low-code empowers professional and business developers with speed, flexibility, and collaboration tools to digitize end-to-end capital requests and approval processes on a single platform. Users get an app that’s accessible from multiple devices, is quick to respond, and offers a consumer-grade UI. IT can integrate the app with ERP systems like SAP Finance to check the capital request against the accounting budget. Further, it’s easy for IT to maintain and frequently update the app in low-code. Cloud-native architecture makes it easy to scale the app based on business demand.

Continental, a leader in automotive technology, used the Mendix Platform to modernize its capital request system. Read Continental’s story.