NC State Realizes Millions in Savings with Low Code Application Development
Enterprise Application “REPORTER” Created with Mendix Centralized the University’s Registration and Tracking System
BOSTON – September 4, 2018 – Mendix, the fastest and easiest platform to create and continuously improve mobile and web applications, today highlights results from a customer success story featuring North Carolina State University. Leveraging the Mendix low-code platform, NC State’s Central IT department created REPORTER, an enterprise level application that allows students and North Carolina residents to register for courses and simplifies reporting to NC State’s grant providers. As a result, the university centralized the registration and tracking system, in turn saving millions of dollars and guaranteeing compliance with government and state grants for non-credit courses.
NC State offers its more than 600,000 local citizens non-credited courses and training sessions, including continuing education courses, Six Sigma and OSHA certifications, professional development seminars and 4H camps. The university receives over 500,000 registrations per year for courses, which contributes to the economic development of North Carolina. However, keeping track of these registrations was difficult, and often managed on paper or in Excel in disparate locations. Individual colleges and departments within the university were responsible for their own registrants, giving little visibility into the true impact it was making on the community.
Other departments at NC State were facing similar issues with tracking and reporting, especially when it came to comply with state and federal regulations for training. IT leaders at NC State realized that without a central system, there was no commonality between the various systems.
NC State ruled out the possibility of creating a system in-house due to limited resources available. Vendors with off-the-shelf software quoted NC State $8 million over five years. Mendix’s proposal for NC State, on the other hand, was substantially lower than the other vendors, coming in at the low six-figures over three months. But, cost and time were not the only contributing factors to Mendix winning the bid.
“The biggest advantages of Mendix were speed, flexibility and cost,” said Jack Foster, enterprise application services director at NC State. “Mendix would allow us to build exactly what we needed without being boxed in. We could jump-start the application, quickly get something into the hands of our users and refine as we went.”
Three team members, including two developers and a business analyst, began work through an agile approach with university departments as pilot customers. The enterprise application, REPORTER, launched as a minimally viable product (MVP) in two months, and fully launched in five months, at a cost in the low six figures, as quoted. With this time and budget savings, NC State invested in a lab management application that has both returned one third or more of researchers’ time, previously used to track lab equipment, and has resulted in over $1 million in lab revenue processed per year.
“With so many unique processes that cannot be served with off-the-shelf software, there is no shortage of needs for Mendix within NC State,” said Gwen Hazlehurst, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Enterprise Application Services at NC State University. “Our vision is to provide each of the 10 colleges that make up the university with a central platform that enables them to quickly build whatever they need, whenever they need it.”
For more information about Mendix’s work with NC State University, please visit https://www.mendix.com/customer-stories/ncsu/.
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