BAE Systems Scales Low-code Development to Advance Digital Transformation

In 2020, BAE Systems began their low-code journey to mitigate shadow IT and become a self-sufficient engine for new, digital solutions. Today, their bespoke application development team is comprised of 13 people lead by team lead, Christopher Hill.

“We have a Mendix-first policy in our department,” Hill said. “Once our solution architects decide on a bespoke application, those requirements come to us for review. So far, everything that’s come to us, we’ve been able to build in Mendix.”

Hill and his colleague Matthew Franks, a Mendix Developer, reflected on their journey to scalable Mendix development at the 2024 UK Manufacturing Forum. Today, their team has delivered over 40 Mendix applications that are making their work more efficient all while keeping the core clean.

Fortifying the Team

After completing their first low-code project in 2020 BAE Systems began laying the groundwork to expand their team by blending full-time, fly-in, and apprentice developers.

The bespoke development team ensures that everyone achieves rapid certification in Mendix. “Any developer that comes into our department will be trained in Mendix, as well as whatever language they’ve come in developing,” Hill said.

Franks, who began as an apprentice, illustrates the success of this enablement strategy. For roughly 3-6 months, IM&T apprentices are placed on a team, get Rapid certified from the Mendix Academy, and then start with simpler projects.

“Speaking from experience, it’s a great introduction into the agile application development as a whole, as well,” Franks shared.

Engaging business users in the development process has also been crucial to their team’s ability to scale.

When they create their first application, business users join Hill’s team to receive support from experienced developers and learn BAE Systems’ established processes and standards.

“We don’t want to go down the Power Apps route with this group to avoid getting into the same mess as we have with Microsoft Access databases. They would end up building a whole lot of stuff and there will be no control.”

This approach not only accelerates project delivery but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement within BAE Systems’ digital transformation efforts.

Setting Scalable Standards

BAE’s adoption of Mendix also coincided with the COVID pandemic, meaning that the way teams were collaborating changed overnight. To remain aligned while working remotely, Hill and the team aligned around five focus areas:

1. Sharing best practices on a regular basis during bi-weekly calls with the team.
2. Setting and documenting development standards for everything from naming conventions to how applications are structured into different modules and reused.
3. Promoting reuse and maintenance. The team sets up an app support page for every Mendix application they create with details like who was involved in developing the application or any specific configurations, so that future developers have historical knowledge to lean on.
4. Minimizing any single points of failure on the team, with a preference to have one developer working on a portion of many applications vs. solely on a single application.
5. Ensuring consistency across their application portfolio by leveraging a themes module that can be imported and contains BAE Systems’ standard fonts, page templates, and images.

Security at the Forefront

BAE’s secure-by-design principles are applied at every stage of development, from design to deployment. This approach complements their Agile way of working and allows BAE Systems to deliver products that meet their customers’ rigorous security guidelines.

BAE’s secure-by-design principles are to:

• Understand and define the context of a business case or set of requirements before beginning development.
• Engage and manage the supply chain by leveraging platform owned and supported Marketplace modules only.
• Assure, verify, and test continuously throughout development and the UAT phase.

These principles have fortified applications like their desk booking system and task management system (TEMS).

One of Franks’ more recent projects is a flight booking application – Flight Ops – which serves all BAE and partner organizations. This application facilitates crucial operations such as flight scheduling, booking management, and administration at private airfields, handling tasks like crew and aircraft assignments.

Given the sensitivity of this data, security was a crucial point for Flight Ops. “That brought across some security considerations like the need for multifactor authentication,” Franks said.

Flight Ops also marked a milestone as the first BAE application hosted on the Mendix Public Cloud.

“Hosting on the cloud doesn’t restrict us from integrating with our apps back on-premises,” he added.

Keeping the Core Clean

From the outset of their Mendix journey, BAE Systems has always used low-code as a means to keep the core clean and avoid further customization of any core systems.

“We are not modifying the core functionality of enterprise systems themselves,” Franks emphasized.

Mendix plays a pivotal role across various core systems at BAE:

• Their enterprise project portfolio management toolset (EPPM) feeds data into Mendix, supporting applications like TEMS and low-level planning solutions.
• BAE’s product lifecycle management toolset (PLM) interacts bidirectionally with Mendix, streamlining approval workflows and automating tasks.
• Mendix retrieves data from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) toolset, enhancing planning capabilities and assigning charge codes.

This data flow enables BAE to generate comprehensive business reports by aggregating data from Mendix applications into a centralized data warehouse. This approach not only enhances data visibility and accessibility for business teams, but also mitigates potential server issues typically associated with extensive reporting tasks at scale.

By maintaining this structured model, BAE Systems ensures robust integration, operational efficiency, and reliable data management across their digital ecosystem.

Full Speed Ahead

BAE Systems remains committed to leveraging Mendix to drive innovation, efficiency, and user-centric development across their operations, marking continued progress in their digital transformation journey.

One major initiative involves digitizing their submarine manufacturing facility, aiming to streamline approximately 50 processes currently reliant on paper and spreadsheets into 3 or 4 integrated applications.

Looking ahead, BAE plans to develop mobile applications in Mendix for their shop floor, leveraging Android devices to facilitate direct requests. These applications will cover dashboard functionalities, real-time tooling machine status updates, and enhanced personnel accountability.

Hill underscored the importance of collaboration in executing these plans. “If anybody’s thinking about doing anything like that, you need to bring those users with you from the beginning. Mendix with the speed of development is great for doing that because you can show it to them and get them involved,” he said.

Another key objective is establishing seamless two-way communication with their ERP system.

Additionally, the team aims to develop a starter application to standardize and document their low-code development practices further. “We’ve got a resources module which have got our standard themes and things like that in it. Now, we are looking at how we can build a starter app, so all our apps will be [based on that]. But we’re waiting until we’ve got our single sign-on…that would form the basis,” Hill shared.

Hill and Franks express pride in their achievements thus far and maintain an ambitious outlook for the future. “We’ve been able to build everything requested by the business using Mendix,” Franks reiterated.