Infosys and Mendix Accelerate Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Manufacturing clients believe creating a standardized and holistic digital backbone is the key to success. And low-code leaders like Mendix empower organizations to build better applications faster, focusing on flexibility and resilience to become future-ready.

According to Saroj Senapathy, Head of Next Gen Technology, Modernization Practice, Infosys, “Many times manufacturing players are challenged by longer time-to-market, high costs, rigid, and siloed IT systems impacting product quality and efficiency of their value chain.”

Speed and scale in manufacturing

Recently, Infosys began work with a global semiconductor manufacturer, which was facing many cost- and efficiency-related IT challenges, such as:

• Increased dependency on existing CRM licenses with high costs
• Extended time to market with heightened effort and added cost for application development
• Lack of multiskilled resources
• Difficulty in managing many technology stacks
• Lack of governance in application development
• Cloud enablement is challenging with the existing application development process

The manufacturing enterprise wanted to create an agile, evolved platform and establish a standardized framework for custom/homegrown applications. They needed to leverage the platform to respond quickly and adapt to issues while remaining cost-efficient. In short, they aimed to speed up development and enable citizen development at scale.

To get to those goals, the client needed a platform that was:

• Easy to use
• Agile and cost-efficient
• Accessible for business users to help reduce time to market
• Able to help define a new, cloud-based architecture to reduce existing CRM license costs
• Visual and built to improve the user interface and user experience of apps
• Collaborative with governance — the platform should enable business and IT to work together with the proper guardrails in place

Platform selection and process definition

Infosys helped the client evaluate platforms and select the right low-code platform: Mendix.

Mendix met all the essential requirements, such as:

• Ensuring effective business-IT communication throughout the application lifecycle
• Providing access to builtin collaboration tools for team development, feedback management, and agile project management
• Delivering end-to-end process automation
• Building and providing portable, scalable, and resilient applications
• Creating apps that could deploy anywhere in one click without specialized expertise

Next, Infosys employed the latest methods for development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) to foster resilience, responsiveness, and relevancy.

The client still had big-picture concerns, including:

• Resistance to change
• Fear of business disruption
• Uncertainty about the end state
• Worry over the complexity of managing the old and new systems together
• Unease over the time and cost of transformation

The client was concerned that the new platform would be difficult to adopt due to the challenges associated with governance, integration with the existing landscape, and an unknown learning curve. Infosys addressed the client’s concerns, which led them to adapt and remain competitive in their marketplace.

To ensure smooth adoption, Infosys focused on two aspects:

1. Setting up a Mendix Center of Excellence
2. Implementing a Core-flex Model of Application Development

1. Setting up a Mendix Center of Excellence

The CoE helped define processes and best practices for the developers to follow. It also enabled the right governance strategy and guardrails.

Some of the critical tasks the Mendix CoE managed were:

• Understanding the existing landscape and defining the application modernization roadmap
• Creating the architecture blueprint
• Defining best practices, processes, and guidelines
• Identifying integration touchpoints and solutions in the Mendix platform
• Technical solutioning
• Creation of a private marketplace consisting of reusable components like starter kits, UI templates, and configurable items
• Setting up a private cloud for regulated applications
• Setting up gating criteria with review and testing to ensure consistent quality
• Providing technical competency and guidance to the development teams

In parallel with the CoE setup, the team developed a couple of simple apps as a learning experience. The dev team then incorporated Insights and findings uncovered during this process into the CoE artifacts.

2. Implementing a Core-flex Model of Application Development

Infosys implemented a core-flex app development model to help the team focus on crucial tasks. They could also add flex team members based on development needs.

The client could deploy their applications and incorporate feedback. As that happened, Infosys could move on to new development.

Quick wins, impressive results

Together with Infosys and Mendix, the team accomplished the following:

• Architectural change: Cloud-based architecture reduced license costs, and cloud adoption provided scalability.
• Faster app deliveries: Time to market was reduced by 5x.
• Increased performance: Configuration-based setups, validations on request submission to improve performance, and normalized structure to eliminate redundancy optimized overall performance.
• Improved look and feel: Improved UI/UX delivered well-organized sections and related attributes.
• New features/components: A new audit history feature helped determine cycle times, and a Watch List component brings together individual users associated with respective user groups.
• Savings in the millions: Optimizing CRM licenses saves millions of dollars.
• Citizen empowerment: Setting up a private marketplace leads to scaling up citizen development.

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