Mendix on AWS: Opportunity Knocks with Intelligent Automation

Creating a portfolio of applications that automate business processes allows you to quickly build out proofs of concept or differentiate from your competitors. The ability to combine many services into an application that automates business-altering, pace-setting workflows can be a powerful boon to your organization. This is why the combination of intelligent automation (IA) solutions from AWS and Mendix’s enterprise application development platform is so exciting and so vital. When opportunity knocks, answer the door with Mendix on AWS.

Why automate?

The prospects of IA are far-reaching and limitlessly beneficial for your business. Building applications that automate workflows is imperative. Repetitive tasks like data entry and file organization can tip up as much as 60 hours per month per employee, according to a 2020 global survey. Per Forrester, 77 percent of enterprises still partially rely on paper processes, and 63 percent rely on Excel-type programs. The damage these inefficiencies can cause is significant, with the IDC stating that organizations stand to lose 20-30 percent in revenue every year because of them. The automation of processes isn’t just a cost-saver; it’s a revenue builder.

Automation can be taken one step further. With the addition of AI and machine learning, robotics process automation, analytics, and process mining, you can create business processes that learn and adapt based on how they’re used and what sort of information they’re working with.

Automate with Mendix on AWS

So how do you build these business-transforming applications? It starts with the many services you find within AWS’s massive library. Finding those services in AWS is easy. For a loan application, banking and financial service institutions could employ web services like:

• Document processing
• Text extraction
• Digital signature

In AWS, they simply need to search for it.

Insurance companies looking to build a claim submission app can find services like:

• Photo recognition
• Digital signature
• GPS

There’s more. Speech to text. Identity and Access Management. Address look-up. These are all services you can integrate into your applications to help digitize and automate processes that are bogging down your organization.

It’s in stringing these services together into an application where it all gets complicated. Enterprise-grade workflows are inherently complex. Along with web services, there are backend systems to consider, data to govern and protect, and development time to factor in.

This is where Mendix on AWS comes in. Mendix’s low-code application development platform unlocks assembly capabilities for business and IT users alike to automate application-driven workflows. With two, purpose-built IDEs—Mendix Studio and Studio Pro—that support a range of developer skillsets, the Mendix Platform supports the entire application development lifecycle.

The importance of two IDEs goes a long way in building out a portfolio of IA applications. Business processes are best understood by those who experience them every day. These people might not have a software programming background, but they know what they need. Using Mendix Studio, they can start an application themselves. When it comes to extend those applications or integrate web services, experienced developers can augment that application in Mendix Studio Pro.

In Studio Pro, developers can build business process workflows using Mendix Workflow, in which developers can create business rules for workflows using Mendix’s microflows—custom logic that’s used to change or extend functionality.

Why automate with Mendix on AWS?

Let’s look at some examples of IA applications built on Mendix that utilize AWS’s services.

• Delivered in just eight weeks with two full-time employees, one business was able to build an app that manages the quote-to-contract process. The results were 25% lower TCO.
• A price and quote portal was delivered in just three months and reduced the cost of customer acquisition by 80 percent.
• A team of just two, full-time IT employees built an end-to-end quality and operations management application in just three weeks. The automation of reporting—previously paper-based—has yielded an 86% time savings for that business.
• In just 20 days, one IT team delivered a native mobile quality management application that’s deployed to Zebra and Honeywell hand scanners. The app had more than 15 service integrations as well as real-time ERP and other data source integrations.

Where to start?

With automation comes so many opportunities. You drive automation with applications. This is why the ability to build those applications faster is crucial for your business. So when looking to build out a portfolio of IA applications, where do you start? Read AWS’s new report that helps you:

• Develop a mental model to determine which kind of IA applications are best suited for Mendix on Aws
• Learn more about what development success looks like with Mendix on AWS
• Determine how to expand your developer talent pool to create more IA applications