Key findings:

User pain points: Customers have increasingly high requirements for the ease of use, friendliness and performance of the electronic ordering system, how to meet the needs of customers to achieve one-click ordering, an invincible position in the competitive industrial market, on the basis of the global common system, to build a rapid order system that meets the local needs of China is a great challenge for Siemens Digital Industry Group.
Solution: Using Mendix low-code platform to develop a Quick Order system (QOP) to help customers realize one-click order requirements, automatically open and synchronize data and information transfer between the five systems, order progress is clear, convenient and fast.
Implementation effect: Mendix low code development, save 50% time, improve order efficiency by more than 50%, customer experience full score!
Selling what we use,

Use what we sell

Siemens Digital Industries is an innovator in the fields of industrial automation, electrical automation, industrial digitization, Industry 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing. The Siemens Digital Industry Group is an important driving force in the digital transformation of discrete and process industries, providing digital factory solutions.

At the same time, Siemens Digital Industry Group is itself a large manufacturing enterprise, providing a variety of electronic order methods such as Mall, ERP2Mall, ERP2ERP to many customers, and has realized 99% of electronic orders. The global unified order management system of Siemens has good universality, but lacks many important functional modules, which is difficult to support local services in China; The locally developed and used DIomis system, although it makes up for most of the functions of the global system, lacks an electronic ordering platform. For SPR type orders, customers need to manually prepare the Excel sheet of product materials, upload it to the Mall, then select the price, and manually compare it to ensure that the materials they fill in the Excel sheet are not different from the SPR of the batch. Some orders hundreds of lines, customers place orders more complicated and cumbersome. With the development of business, customers have put forward higher requirements for system usability, friendliness and performance. How to get closer to the Chinese market, quickly respond to customer needs, and quickly upgrade the ordering system has become an urgent problem in front of industrial groups.

Following the philosophy of “We sell the products and services we use, we use the products and services we sell”, the Siemens Digital Industries Group actively uses Siemens products to complete end-to-end digitalization.

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Wang Fang, CRM application manager of IT department of Siemens Digital Industry Group in China, said that in the early stage of preparing for the development of the rapid order system, the first idea that jumped into our mind was to use Siemens’ Mendix low-code development platform to achieve rapid development online. First, because Mendix is a software and application development platform owned by Siemens, but also because Mendix can meet the technical needs of our development projects.

First of all, Mendix is a product used and sold by Siemens itself, with a professional team and a complete ecosystem in China to provide services and support; From the perspective of technology and development, it also has considerable advantages:

1) Mendix connects business with BizDevOps development model, visualization and model-driven development, fast presentation, allowing business to communicate directly with applications without barriers;

2) Mendix covers the whole life cycle of agile development +DevOps, which can quickly respond to the rapidly changing needs of the system in business digitalization;

3) Mendix supports a variety of available standardized components, ranging from purely technical components (such as a microservice component that implements data interfaces) to business components (such as a relatively independent reporting component with business logic).

For these reasons, the IT department of Siemens Digital Industries China decided to adopt the Mendix low-code development platform to implement the rapid ordering system.

The road to innovation is winding,

Mendix was there with him

Siemens Digital Industry Group has a large and complex business volume, with annual sales of more than 40 billion yuan in China. The business types involve distribution business, system integration business, total contract business, direct sales business, spare parts business, etc., and there are various strict compliance control and process optimization requirements. Mendix Low Code platform As a low code platform from abroad, can the application be developed to meet the requirements in terms of compliance and process?

The project team then made a number of feasibility analyses, such as how to support a large amount of data, multi-system complex interfaces, cloud deployment, and how to meet complex processes, to achieve high logic application development and so on. After verification, Mendix fully meets the relevant complexity and compliance controls and other requirements, and in May 2022, the final decision was made to use Mendix low code for the development of electronic ordering system. The actual development began in July to the user acceptance test in October, and only took less than 3 months, saving 50% of the time compared to the traditional development.

The rapid order system consists of four micro-applications, “SLC order”, “SFAE order”, “Master data” and “basic”, and is integrated with eight upstream and downstream systems. The core competencies formed in the dimensions of “orders”, “products”, “prices” and “users” effectively meet the needs of the business.