How to Extend and Personalize Your Siemens Xcelerator Portfolio With Low-Code

When it comes to digital transformation, acceleration is the name of the game. The faster a manufacturing company can achieve its digital transformation goals, the faster it can start delivering speed and agility to its shop floor, keeping its quality management processes running smoothly and dependably, and making its supply chains more resilient against disruption.

That’s why many manufacturers are using Siemens Xcelerator as their open digital business platform. Siemens Xcelerator speeds up digitalization by giving manufacturers access to a curated portfolio of hardware and software, an ecosystem of partners, and an extensive marketplace. Manufacturers find Siemens Xcelerator facilitates the enterprise-wide collaboration that is the key element to successful digitalization initiatives.

Siemens Xcelerator is an incredibly open and flexible platform. While that is the foundation of its effectiveness and allows it to serve the needs of a wide range of customers, every manufacturing company has its own unique challenges, processes, and goals. A manufacturer might fully understand and appreciate the benefits of Siemens Xcelerator while still wondering if it is a right fit for them.

But the manufacturers who have done their homework know they can have the best of both worlds: the wide-ranging features of Siemens Xcelerator, all perfectly tuned to the company’s needs. All that’s needed to have your cake and eat it too is the Mendix low-code application development platform.

By placing the Mendix platform on top of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, you can add a layer of personalization while keeping your core systems clean. Extending the Siemens Xcelerator platform with Mendix lets you:

• Add offline and native mobile capabilities
• Simplify user interfaces
• Curate functions and features
• Make data from multiple Xcelerator elements actionable in a unifying workflow

Pilatus Aircraft Ltd, manufacturer of unique aircraft such as the single-engine turboprop PC-12 and the short-runway business jet PC-24, is one of the many companies fine-tuning their Siemens Xcelerator portfolio with the Mendix platform. One of the apps they’ve built with low-code has eliminated many of their paper-based shopfloor processes, improving efficiency and markedly cutting costs. (If you’d like to hear more from Pilatus Aircraft about the apps they’re building on the Mendix platform, they’ll be presenting at Realize LIVE in Munich in July.)

To give manufacturers who have not discovered the power of low-code yet a clearer idea of the many ways that the Mendix platform can customize their Siemens Xcelerator experience, the Siemens experts of the various Xcelerator elements have created a library of examples of what is possible and useful.

From making lab requests more intuitive to giving shopfloor workers easier access to documentation, our examples show off the broad range of functionality low-code apps can provide to your manufacturing processes.

• Intuitive Lab Order Creation: Submitting requests to a laboratory for material or product testing can be a confusing process for employees that do not plan such tasks. So as one of its examples, Siemens designed a low-code app that provides an intuitive lab request interface with seamless access to Opcenter RD&L. Employees and customers can now create and submit lab orders that provide all the needed information, resulting in time savings and error prevention.
• Mobile Document Approval for Teamcenter: High-level executives in design or production planning departments can get frustrated because they are traveling around the world but also need to keep the department running at home and approve valuable design or process iterations quickly. What they need is remote access to Teamcenter approval workflows on their mobile and handheld devices. Siemens built a low-code Teamcenter extension app that focuses only on document approval. It also streamlines access to Teamcenter on a mobile device so users can use their device to view and sign off on documents.
• Mobile and Offline Sampling for Opcenter RD&L: To ensure the quality of their products and ingredients, manufacturers often need to take samples around the clock. However, sampling can take place in locations and environments where a stable network connection is not guaranteed. Siemens designed a low-code app that lets testers use mobile devices or handheld scanners to take samples anytime and synchronizes the results back to Opcenter RD&L when the device is back in network coverage. This accelerates the sampling process, minimizes testing errors, and improves productivity and quality.
• Teamcenter Lookup and Report: In engineer-to-order and even configure-to-order scenarios, shopfloor workers need access to the latest drawing or process planning releases because updates happen while production has already started. They also need to be able to quickly submit problem reports from mobile devices when engineering support is required. Siemens built a low-code app that provides streamlined access to Teamcenter so that shopfloor workers can look up the latest part information, view related visualization data, and create and submit problem reports. This accelerates the closed-loop feedback process by providing easy access to problem reporting at the moment of identification.

Not only is Mendix making it easier to see the benefits of personalizing and extending your Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, it’s also making it more affordable than ever with its newly introduced Xcelerator Low-Code Extension License. Contact us today for more information.

If you’re interested in more information, do read How to Extend and Personalize Your Siemens Xcelerator Portfolio with Low-Code blog from Mendix.

Posts by: Sebastian Bersch