Digitalize your Business Processes with Low-Code Applications

Requests, reviews, approvals, changes, escalations, declines, etc. — these tasks are barely the tip of the workflow iceberg. According to Garner, “70 percent of organizations still rely on paper-based activities for critical business processes.”[1] Manual or broken processes – even legacy systems – exist in virtually every organization.

Employees are trapped in spreadsheets, or stuck in many disconnected systems, or even paper-based tasks. The demand to have a flexible, future-proof tool to automate processes and increase overall operational efficiency is intense.

When Siemens Digital Industries Software Europe came against these challenges in their own booking system, they turned to a low-code solution to connect their vendors, centralize asset information, and access and streamline their booking process.

Low-code solutions, like the one Siemens built and used, give companies the power of app development without the prerequisite of coding knowledge, so they can quickly create personalized applications that fit their unique business needs.

Siemens Digital Industries Software needed to optimize their management and booking process for sponsor assets. From virtual global events to trackside hospitality to factory visits, they needed to communicate availability of assets and streamline booking for internal and external users, including sales personnel, channel managers and partners. This need became even more pronounced with the pandemic, which created new challenges of virtual-based events, like virtual factory tours.

To address these issues, Siemens leveraged Mendix™, a market-leading low-code development platform, which Siemens acquired in 2018, to develop the sponsor asset booking system (SSABS), an application to manage asset usage from their sponsorship agreements. Mendix allowed Siemens to:

• Collaborate between business experts & developers
• Integrate with systems for seamless data access, even for legacy systems
• Scale with evolving business needs

• Collaborate between business experts & developers: Low-code solutions bridge the gap between business operations and developers, allowing cross-functional teams to communicate and collaborate throughout the development process. This ensures that applications achieve the expected results in less time. In a mere three weeks, Siemens’ business partners worked with IT developers to create the SSABS app that would guide users through the entire booking process while requiring no additional training.
• Integrate with systems: When workflows and processes are not easily accessible, automated or scalable, it can create significant inefficiencies. However, low-code can give businesses the tools to unlock and integrate data from different systems, even from legacy systems. This is the basis for end-to-end visibility for the whole automated business process. With the Mendix-powered application, SSABS provides full visibility into the workflow. Now, the requester can communicate directly with sponsors in the process, significantly increasing efficiency.
• Scale with evolving business needs: Business priorities are dynamic and constantly changing. Solutions created with low-code are scalable, adaptable, and portable, allowing companies to alter existing processes and solutions quickly with evolving business requirements. With SSABS, Siemens can analyze asset usage. Based on insights from this analysis, they can implement continuous optimization based on scientific analysis, such as annual sponsorship requests.

Siemens Digital Industries Software Europe created a centralized, scalable, and user-friendly sponsoring asset management application using low-code. Since the application’s development, it has enhanced sponsor asset utilization for sales references and marketing events, as well as streamlined the asset booking-to-delivery process.

Interested in learning more about how Siemens leveraged their own low-code solutions? Read the detailed story here.

Check out these other posts on low-code development:

• Creating low-code solutions with big impacts
• The bridge to innovation