Leverage Low-Code to Achieve the Benefits of Operational Efficiency

This blog post is part of our series focusing on the Forrester TEI report for Mendix’s Low-Code Application Platform report. By using Mendix for your development needs, you can generate $20M in net benefits. In this blog, we’ll focus on the operational efficiency benefits noted by enterprise technical and organizational leaders interviewed by Forrester for the study. Other sections cover application delivery savings, custom engagement, and time-to-market advantages attributed to the Mendix platform.

When legacy systems and applications—built by different departments at different times and for different needs—can’t access the same informational highway, it takes new infrastructure or manual workarounds to bypass digital dead ends. These workarounds incur costs, technical debt, and missed opportunities.

According to Forrester’s deep dive into Mendix’s total economic impact, an enterprise could see a $6 million, three-year benefit in operational efficiencies attributed to the low-code application development platform. Although the Mendix customers Forester interviewed for the TEI report come from different backgrounds, the benefits they experience follow two major themes: reducing human process intervention and increasing access to data. Let’s take a look at both benefit areas, as well as some concrete, on-the-ground examples of enterprises realizing operational efficiency savings and benefits.

Enterprises suffer from inefficient time delays, increased costs, and low-quality output when operations systems are not optimized. Employees using email, spreadsheets, or—help us—hand-written, paper-based manual processes invites the risk of human error, and it takes a lot of time and effort to suss out problems and fix them.

Mendix applications help unify data silos, which reduces manual intervention. They also scale with future innovation as the organization grows. Many of the data entry tasks, emails sent, and tables maintained in spreadsheet form can be turned into automated applications that require no human task intervention with Mendix’s low-code platform. In addition, AI and machine learning can even intelligently suggest new logic to improve efficiency.

According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report, creating applications to automate, streamline, and digitize operations increase employee productivity and decrease cost. The time spent moving data from one column to the next or emailing approval requests to different departments can be spent on more productive pursuits. In addition, user interfaces built for business-IT collaboration, citizen development work, and multi-experience frameworks make it easier to create new, innovative processes dreamed up—and in many cases developed—by the people who use them.

When Zurich Insurance was presented with a critical digital transformation to protect a vital segment of its business portfolio, the DevOps team knew it had a significant challenge on its hands. First, to deliver crucial data to their business patterns, they had to modernize a legacy policy administration application fraught with data errors. The old system was erected on an ancient 2002 SQL Server build that was even harder to maintain than work. At Zurich, 700+ underwriters were forced daily to navigate stubborn data entry interfaces that required hours of work to fix simple mistakes.

To address the process issues—in addition to the data entry, integrity, and validation issues—the Zurich DevOps team turned to Mendix’s low-code platform and switched from a traditional development methodology to an agile framework to get the job done. Mendix’s collaborative UI made it easier for the team to nurture the insurance company’s new customer-forward strategy of creating useful and usable applications at speed.

With Mendix’s model-driven development and rapid prototyping capabilities, Zurich was able to build an app in just 12 weeks that automated processes, reduced user error, and allowed the DevOps team to satisfy the requirements set forth by their business partners. The insurer began realizing value nine months ahead of schedule. The development team at Zurich has since added to their suite of applications built on Mendix’s low-code application development platform, at an estimated annual minimum savings of $50k–$100K per app compared to their old method of development.

Navigating through data silos, non-communicative legacy systems, and shadow IT solutions adds to enterprise workloads and adds to the risk of missing big opportunities. Mendix applications digitize and streamline processes.

Developers use abstraction, composability, and other rapid application development techniques to build solutions that improve business processes and drive revenue, according to Forrester’s TEI report. Access to the right data at the right time leads to more informed decision-making, increased productivity, and decreased costs.

Applications developed with Mendix communicate with each other, opening interdepartmental and cross-system data combinations. With Mendix-built applications, business users can create an application to pull data from any source through the visual development Mendix Studio interface, explicitly tailored for citizen developers.

Continental is a software-driven automotive innovation company. When the software and application platforms Continental used to manage digital processes were reaching the end of life, the Digital Applications Platforms team knew they needed to modernize their replacement to build their digital transformation initiatives.

Continental wanted a solution that would scale out and up and could incorporate cutting-edge technology as it happened. The team had already set its sights on mobile optimizations and cloud technology enhancements to reduce latency issues. They wanted a platform that would promote iterative, rapid development frameworks that increased the frequency of business and IT interactions.

Using Mendix’s low-code platform, Continental built a range of solutions that have helped streamline finance, HR, and purchasing processes.

Some of the innovations developed on the Mendix platform by the Digital Applications Platforms team have led to cleaner integrations with backend ERP systems, more available data, and better search experiences for their customers. Others are massive applications that process budget approvals and requests and are used by 10,000 employees worldwide.

While Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study captures the value of low-code application development platforms, your enterprise’s operational efficiency benefits continue well beyond the reported three-year window with Mendix.

See how you can build more applications that streamline business processes and workflows with Mendix. Download the full report today and then reference our helpful articles or reach out to learn more.