Accelerate Digital Transformation of Bosch Automotive Electronics with Mendix
As a software developer within the software of a manufacturing enterprise, how can I better contribute to the company’s digital transformation? Jiaqi Wang and his team have embarked on a path that may be “replicated”.
Jiaqi Wang is the Digital Product Development Manager at Bosch’s Automotive Electronics Division, where he leads a team that leverages Mendix low-code to digitize factory projects, planning and development, and the promotion of new development technologies.
With the acceleration of digital transformation and the continuous increase of business needs, Jiaqi is tasked with shortening development time by 30% and improving development efficiency by 20%.
However, Jiaqi Wang and his team feel that the marginal benefits of the traditional high-code development model are decreasing due to long development cycles and high required resource investments. At the same time, Jiaqi is seeking how to improve the efficiency of communication with business departments and correctly understand their needs.
How do you get your team out of the “swamp” of software development to achieve your goals? Low-code is a magic weapon in Wang’s hands. In this customer case, let’s get closer to Jiaqi Wang and his Bosch Automotive Electronics Division to listen to their “strongest voice.”
A Digitally Driven Lighthouse Factory
Bosch’s Automotive Electronics Division is committed to empowering an intelligent world through superior quality and leading-edge hardware technology. The division specializes in the research and development, manufacturing, and sales of automotive electronic control units, as well as automotive and consumer semiconductor and sensor components.
Since 2013 – as one of Bosch’s first demonstration bases for the implementation of Industry 4.0 in China – the Automotive Electronics Division has been actively promoting a variety of Industry 4.0 applications in manufacturing and logistics. They rely on Bosch’s lean production system, implementing digital transformation strategies in four core areas: organizational culture, IT data strategy, business applications, and human capabilities.
High Code Development Costs are High
As a digital product development manager, Jiaqi Wang is always thinking about how to better expand digital application scenarios in the business field.
When addressing software development within their factories, Wang and his team need to look at the entire process before deciding on the right technology. When business teams – such as HR, production, quality, or logistics – would bring requirements forward, it was challenging to understand and visualize them with high code.
“Writing detailed requirements takes a lot of effort and can last several months. Then, it can take several months for the team to complete the rollout of the system. By the time the business department sees the solution, it can be over a year later and their requirements or processes have been fine-tuned or changed,” said Wang.
“We also have cases where we need to address short-term and urgent system requirements and simply can’t wait that long to get a system in place,” he continued.
Faced with the above scenario, Wang and his team were looking for tools to more effectively support the communication between the business and development team. They found that the main reason for the above phenomenon is that the business department cannot read the code, so in the traditional development model, the business can only provide business advice after the system development is completed.
This “invisible” model greatly reduces the efficiency, and low-code can provide strong support here, as developers can borrow Mendix to build the system interface in 1-2 weeks or even less time. The business department can watch the demo with the digital product development department every week.
If business changes occur during the period, you can iterate in time without waiting for the system to be developed. However, even when the product manager and the business demander are on the same page, they encounter new challenges when they are ready to develop.
“With high-code development, the minimum configuration is one colleague on the front end, one colleague on the back end, and one colleague for testing – basically three developers need to pounce on a certain project. Some projects are more complex and may require three to five people. Every time the requirements are elaborated and clarified, it will lead to repeated iterations of development, because development is also in this cycle, and the cost of time and resources is very high,” Wang said.
The core of software development lies in the design model, which includes two parts: the data model and the logic model. The data model is closely related to the database table structure, while the logical model involves indirect entities between data and business use. In the traditional high-code development model, the key part of logic design is almost entirely dependent on the coding team.
When designing software models, teams rely on detailed documentation that contains complex information such as libraries, tables, models, and more. However, the drawback of this approach is that the information is hidden deep inside the document, which is not intuitive, and it is difficult for non-specialists to quickly understand and verify.
In addition, components in high-code development rely on multiple different versions of libraries, which can lead to conflicts and high rollout costs.
In the face of complex and changeable requirements and high code requirements for manpower and cost, is there a better way and tool to deal with it? Jiaqi Wang’s answer is low-code as a development tool.
Fully Embrace Mendix, Get Started Quickly with Low-Code
In order to improve development efficiency, Wang led the team to actively embrace low-code.
“80% of our team’s process-based software project development uses low-code platforms such as Mendix to reduce the need for high-code development. In this year’s software development, as long as we can use low-code, we will use low-code, and even if this function has not been implemented, we will try to use low-code,” he emphasized.
When choosing low-code, Bosch Automotive Electronics will decide whether to buy, develop in-house, or combine high-low-code based on:
- Business complexity
- Data logic
- Algorithm rules
- System integration needs
- Whether advanced technologies (such as big data analytics, machine vision, AI, etc.) are required.
If business needs change frequently, or if the project is in the exploratory phase, the ability of a low-code platform to iterate and change quickly gives it an advantage over high-code.
To that end, Jiaqi Wang’s team organized Mendix low-code training this year.
“We invited people interested in business and non-digital product development to participate, and we conducted five rounds of basic training over a six-month period,” he said.
“Through simple business use cases, such as day-to-day task management, we teach how to turn Excel sheets into digital applications and deploy them on the company’s CI/CD platform to enable business colleagues to better understand and apply low-code technologies. Through continuous training, we want to empower everyone in the business to quickly prototype with low-code tools,” Wang continued.
Simplifying Development with Low-Code
In practice, low-code development platforms have been effective in simplifying the software development process.
“The traditional development process includes multiple time-consuming and unavoidable steps such as business data modeling, technical or product design training, online collaboration, front-end and back-end handoffs, API development, integration, and testing. These steps are not only cumbersome, but often require repeated revisions and adjustments, resulting in long development cycles and wasted resources,” said Wang.
In contrast, low-code platforms make the development process more intuitive and efficient through graphical programming and model-driven design. Developers can leverage the platform’s built-in business and data model to quickly reuse existing front-end components and back-end logic, reducing the amount of manual coding.
He also mentioned that their goal is to enable development teams to use low-code platforms as tools to quickly turn ideas into real-world features. In this way, the cost of iteration and communication in the development process is significantly reduced, and development time is saved by about 30%.
Enterprise Architecture Optimization
For Bosch’s Automotive Electronics Division, the introduction of Mendix is not just the introduction of a development tool, but also focuses on the transformation of enterprise application development architecture.
Bosch’s priority was to implement Mendix as a platform that could better integrate their existing enterprise software capabilities and support their business requirements in an agile way.
Combined with the actual situation of the business unit, Mendix planned the introduction idea of building a prefabricated business. At present, the prefabricated business structure has already achieved initial results in the Bosch Automotive Electronics Division.
Specifically, it is manifested in:
- Flexibility and agility: Ability to quickly respond to changes in business needs, quickly build new business processes and applications by combining and reconfiguring existing modules, and adapt to market dynamics.
- Modular design: Decompose business functions into independent and reusable modules. Each module has clear boundaries and functions, making it easy to develop, test, deploy, and maintain independently.
- Decoupling: The relationship between different modules is loose, which reduces the interdependence between modules, so that the modification of one module will not easily affect other modules, thus improving the stability and scalability of the system.
- Efficient reuse: Make full use of existing modules and components to reduce repetitive development work, improve development efficiency, and reduce development costs.
- Rapid integration: Ability to easily integrate new modules or external services into existing architectures for rapid business innovation and scaling.
- Visual management: Provides an intuitive graphical interface to facilitate the design, monitoring, and management of business architecture, enabling business personnel and technical personnel to better understand and communicate.
- Customizability: According to the specific needs and business scenarios of enterprises, flexible customization and combination of modules to meet personalized business requirements.
- Continuous optimization: The performance and functions of each module can be continuously evaluated and improved to achieve continuous optimization and evolution of the business architecture.
Visualizing Requirements & Easier Deployment
According to Jiaqi Wang, the advantages of Mendix low-code are mainly reflected in the:
- Visualization of requirements understanding
- Rapid prototyping and demand feedback and iteration
- Reduction of development costs
In the application development process, poor communication of business requirements is the most likely cause of project development failure. Ensuring that there is no ambiguity between the two parties in understanding the requirements is critical to the success or failure of the entire project.
Traditionally, due to the technical background of the business and the developer, it is difficult to ensure that both parties understand the requirements in a text-based manner.
After the introduction of Mendix, with the help of Mendix’s graphical development feature, business personnel and developers can communicate business needs based on graphical product prototypes. They can achieve the effect of “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
Based on Mendix’s low-code prototyping capabilities, business people no longer see a static “sketch”, but a product prototype with basic interactive demonstration capabilities. Mendix’s requirements visualization ensures that the digital product development team is doing the right things from the start.
Accurate requirements understanding can radically reduce business defects and project rework. Combined with low-code development, application development can really make the development team do more with less.
“At the same time, the reusability of the developed modules and components can greatly increase our speed and have saved 30% of the development time,” he added.
Compared with high-code development, low-code development is more streamlined in terms of personnel requirements and does not require a large number of front-end, back-end, and test developers to work together, thus reducing development costs.
In addition, the learning cost of low-code platforms is relatively low, and people with different backgrounds can participate in development, improving development efficiency and flexibility.
Bosch Automotive Electronics has developed 20+ Mendix projects, integrating IT and OT technologies to cover core business areas such as production, finance, quality, and logistics. With Mendix, Bosch Automotive has also developed platform tools for continuous deployment and O&M management for digital development teams.
The abstracted nature of Mendix also provides significant time and cost savings for Bosch during deployment. Developers only need to upload and fill out the pipeline form to apply for release. With one click, applications can be deployed without any specialized knowledge on the back-end orchestration.
Native Modules are Abundant and Reusable
Wang also highlighted the advantages of low-code platforms, especially Mendix, in the use of native modules and features. “Although these native modules may not fully meet the individual needs of users, they facilitate rapid development and deployment,” he said.
During the development process, the team prioritizes native modules and Mendix Marketplace components. If they can’t find a suitable module, they consult with partners or implementers before considering custom development. The developed components will be added to the company’s component library for future reuse.
Achieving high-code reuse requires the enterprise digital product development team to invest sufficient effort in planning and design. However, Jiaqi’s team is not a software manufacturer. If you don’t develop on a low-code platform, it’s very expensive to experiment with a component and tell others how to use it.
At the same time, in software development, they often encounter conflicts between different versions of component libraries, such as the incompatibility between library A and library B. When it comes to promotion, these conflicting issues need to be resolved, and the cost is very high. These two issues can make low-code rollout difficult.
A drag-and-drop low-code development platform like Mendix solves these challenges. Bosch is now using the Mendix platform to create component-based libraries to promote to users.
Mendix has built in many of the information security features that an international company like Bosch needs. For example, in the case of file storage, these files end up in the form of images or documents in the background of their systems.
“For a global company like Bosch, which has strict data protection regulations, these file stores need to be encrypted, depending on the software-defined data level, if the confidentiality is high. Mendix has implemented these encryption and accessibility features, including rights management, as well as ID-based document preservation forms, which are industry best practices,” said Wang.
Jiaqi Wang believes that Mendix has significantly improved development efficiency and simplified the development process by providing rapid development capabilities and strong ecosystem support.