As part of a strategic move, HST is gearing up to offer customers a one-stop-shop for its full range of transport and logistic services, while profiting internally from cross selling these services across all its business units. Importantly, such a move needs the support of information and communication technology (ICT).
Henk Pieffers, operations manager at HST Transmissions, the business unit responsible for road transport within Benelux, was involved in implementing HST Online five years ago. This online application supports Transmissions’ own operations and that of its customers, and was an obvious candidate to support HST’s new strategy.
However, HST Online is not web-based and does not use standard browser software. “Although HST Online continues to serve us well, it also means manually installing and maintaining the application software on our customers’ computers, all 150 of them.”
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There were other reasons why HST needed a brand-new application. It was looking for an application to be used by all business units. This meant an application with wider functionality than what HST Online offered, and one that also fulfilled the requirements of HST’s other business units and disciplines.
Crucially, this application would be required to support and facilitate HCT’s two salespersons in selling to 500-600 clients, across all business units, and involving different business requirements. And “with internet-access fairly wide-spread at our customers’ premises nowadays, the new application had to be a web-based portal,” says Pieffers
In support of its contract logistics and supply-chain management activities, Kuehne + Nagel Logistics offers total logistics planning, control and execution services, which are designed to turn its customers’ logistics into a competitive advantage. Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in improving Kuehne + Nagel’s operational efficiency and effectiveness, and that of its clients. One such client is Unilever, a global manufacturer of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Crucially, the cornerstone of Unilever’s customer service philosophy is the assurance it offers retailers that Unilever always delivers what it promises, and on time. That is why Unilever turned to Kuehne + Nagel Logistics in 2008 to help it improve its lead times and order processing time. Considering the complexity of the logistics involved and the time available, this was somewhat of a challenge to achieve. “Unilever has to reconcile its pending orders with available stock,” says Joost Hupkens, information services project manager at Kuehne + Nagel Logistics. “In the case of a shortfall, stock allocation is based on a predefined orderfulfillment priority list.”
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/442The need for screening services is increasing rapidly. Whether it concerns an employee, a tenant or even a volunteer, the harm that a screening 'mismatch' can be enormous. The prior verification of specific, relevant data helps to better map out certain risks before working together with someone. These screenings are all based on the same process for companies, landlords and foundations alike. However, they were seen as a time-consuming non-core processes. Therefore, Validata came to Finaps with the question: How can we build a fully automatic screening engine to automise the screening process of any organisation?
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/179The Fraud Management and Operations department continuously and securely monitors fraudulent activity on all ING products. Once a client's activity, such as a specific transaction or logging into My ING, is considered suspicious, it is immediately investigated and adequately acted upon. It is essential to handle these alerts with high speed and in a customer-friendly way. This required an application with a high degree of automation to handle alerts and to manage suspicious fraudulent activities.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/181Due to tough economic conditions, the construction industry is facing numerous challenges, including lower customer volume and rising price competition. At the same time, supply chains are evolving, from specialists focused on the lowest price to integrators focused on the lowest total cost of ownership.
Plegt-Vos knew that efficiency and innovation were the keys to surviving and thriving in this business climate. More specifically, the company saw the growing importance of sharing knowledge across the supply chain to ensure that all partners and suppliers could easily contribute their insight and best practices to construction and real estate projects.
Unfortunately, Plegt-Vos’ existing ERP system couldn’t meet these changing demands. “We tried to leverage a single ERP implementation for the entire business, but this approach limited our agility and ability to differentiate in a competitive market,” said Ernst-Jan Companje, Group Controller at Plegt-Vos. “We needed a way to quickly extend our core system with apps tailored to our unique needs.”
For retailers and other logistic-centric businesses, the escalating expenses of international shipments can represent a significant opportunity to achieve greater efficiency. Spring Global Mail, one of the world’s leading international mail brokers, helps companies consolidate and distribute their parcels and ship them in bulk to streamline processes and lower their costs compared to conventional postal services.
Carefully tracking the thousands of in-transit packages requires a significant and sophisticated IT infrastructure. For years, the company relied on a timeshared, mainframe-based operational control system to monitor all the goods moving through its network. “At any given time, we have dozens of internal specialists tracking thousands of receptacles in as many as 15 different countries,” explained Erwin Serlé, Manager Strategic IT Sourcing and Projects.
“Previously, we managed these logistics on a hosted mainframe application, but we needed to migrate off of that platform. That presented an exciting opportunity for our company to create an entirely new and smarter application driven by business rules and contemporary interfaces and architectures – no more green-screen.”
The customer needed a new helpdesk system that would be better, faster and easier to use. The system that they have been using until that day was not able to fulfil all of the customers’ needs adequately. They felt that they need a modern web based service tool that could support the performance the The customer with its external customers as well as their internal ones within the scope of the IT service management. The new service tool should be included in the already existing process and IT environment of the customer. The 50 employees of this specific department at the customer were not able anyone to cope with approximately 8500 tickets per year from 300 different customers who would send out service requests. All the different requests were sent out via email and the customer was not able to check if the correct contact person was the sender. That was the reason for a very troublesome and tedious working atmosphere. The customer felt the need to speed things up and to be more productive.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/89To reduce costs, Sanquin has outsourced the IT services to an external provider. “But we did not foresee that we would lose control over our servicep roces” explains Paul Swart, project manager. “The influence that we had on the control and with that on the overall quality of the IT service came under pressure. Which led to an unbalanced situation between the sourcer, internal staff and the enduser. End users had the feeling that their requests ended up in a big black box”. Sanquin needed a solution that could provide transparency as well as govern the agreements between the internal IT staff and the sourcer. Basically, they wanted to stop the arguing over service level agreements. For all parties involved it was frustrating and there was a clear need for one single source of registration of all tickets. This would be the basis for getting back in control and get insight in the performance and monitoring of the SLA’s. In addition, they wanted to improve efficiency and harmonize processes between the different departments, leading Sanquin to the decision to look for a partner to help them achieve these goals and improve end user satisfaction.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/82Reggefiber is gaining momentum because of its current strong growth. To be able to maintain quality customer service, it became necessary to modify many business processes. In 2008, entering and processing orders as well as creating invoices were performed manually, which was very time-consuming as their customer database was increasing rapidly. Reggefiber delivers its services throughout The Netherlands and is regulated by the ‘OPTA’, an independent organization that monitors compliance with Dutch telecom legislation. This involves that Reggefiber must comply with a number of strict KPI’s, such as fixed delivery times. It requires considerable coordination as well as a number of well-organized work processes, in order to deliver all connections and services on time. Therefore, comparing different solutions about several aspects, Reggefiber has considered several software solutions that would optimally support their administrative processes. When selecting the right supplier, it was important that the new solution required little manpower, to avoid the IT department being confronted with capacity problems. A second aspect was Reggefiber’s aim to extend the solution in the future with new functionalities and automation of other business processes, without any problems. The fact that Mendix/ExpertDesk supports service processes as well was a considerable plus to Reggefiber.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/74• The application needed to be available 24 / 7; • The application needed to run on multiple devices; • The customers of Sanitas shouldn’t see any differences in quality and documents; • The users should use the application without instruction; • PO quote: “If the application needs a manual, than the application isn’t good enough” • Integration with other Sanitas (Mendix-based) applications
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/322Creating facultative reinsurance programs involves a considerable amount of information processing based on complex rules and decision workflows. Providing external underwriters convenient access to this offering required an automated portal that verifies and quotes prices was required to. Additionally, the portal had to be flexible enough to support the ever-changing business requirements and needs of Arch Re's clients.
A new, customisable self-service portal would be central to Arch Re Fac, as it provides underwriters and clients the information they need to draw up the reinsurance program. Therefore, Philip Augur, Chief Operations Officers at Arch Re Fac asked Finaps the question: Can you build us an online mechanism that clients can use to report risk subjects to a contract and underwriters can use to conduct pricing evaluations?
• The application needed to be available 24 / 7; • The application needed to run on multiple devices; • The customers of Sanitas shouldn’t see any differences in quality and documents; • The users should use the application without instruction; • Total integration with internal SLS application using WS; • The application should provide the right info on the right time, when needed and where needed;
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/354The telecommunications industry is evolving into a highly competitive volume market. Deal sizes are decreasing while the cost and complexity of sales support is increasing. These trends are creating new needs for achieving profitability in this already competitive industry. Sales support has become a key success factor, and therefore managing lines of communications between these entities has become imperative. As the network grew in size and reach, it became increasingly difficult to maintain lines of communication throughout distribution channels.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/77AZL wanted to reduce billing costs and the number of manual operations. All invoices had to be imported manually. The process was devious and adjustments took a lot of time and effort.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/321Mendix teamed up with its partner, Mansystems, to deliver a mobile application for field-based project officers working for War Child in Uganda to report, in real time, on the progress of their interventions, which focus on empowering children and young people affected by conflict in Northern Uganda. After decades of war, conflict, and brutal oppression at the hands of dictator Idi Amin and rebel leader Joseph Kony, a new generation of young people in Uganda are rebuilding and reclaiming their lives. Thanks to a range of social services and programs from War Child, children and young people in the war-torn country are now re-emerging to learn life skills, vocational skills, and entrepreneurial skills and receive education, protection, and psychosocial support. But the lack of any automated infrastructure behind these programs in Uganda was a serious obstacle. In particular, data collection and reporting on the various activities and programs was trapped in manual paper or Excel spreadsheets that were completed intermittently at best and that required significant time from project officers who preferred to work with children and young people, not paperwork. According to Ernst Suur, program development advisor, field reports – so vital to demonstrating measurable progress and securing continued funding from donors – were a time-consuming headache. “We had many project officers in remote areas of Uganda who were filling out reports on paper,” he said. “It wasn’t uncommon for those reports to get rained on, eaten by mice, or lost. And moving to Excel wasn’t a big improvement because of the difficult interface and the challenges of using a PC in remote areas.”
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/78The goal of DLM Finance is to add value for its clients by integrating treasury operations into the DLM Trade Manager. The DLM Trade Manager is unique in its concept, because it is a system that is specifically built for fund management in emerging and frontier markets. DLM came to Finaps with a specific question: Can Finaps build a multi company and web-based treasury management system that is professional, secure and efficient?
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/178DHB used a networkhost to allocate orders among the partners as efficient as possible. The networkhost aged over time and DHB wanted to renew the networkhost, which was built in the cloud. Besides that, they wanted the new application to automatically send changes and mutations to the concerned party. DHB insisted that the new networkhost would be built in Mendix.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/443Terre des Hommes has the goal of combining high impact projects with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Therefore, Terre des Hommes wanted Finaps to build a single application that can streamline internal processes while at the same time allowing partners to report about aid spending and deliverables.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/182The previous EDC system in place at the Julius Center was not ideal. The system had been developed using a traditional approach, requiring new code to be written for each and every function. That made the system rigid, time-consuming, and expensive to develop and adapt. Frank Leus, Head of Data Management & Project Support at the Julius Center, decided to abandon this system. The new system needed to facilitate faster builds and continued development. It also had to be flexible and user-friendly, as well as compliant with modern laws and regulations.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/90Metis was disappointed in the existing notarial software, which could not offer what they were looking for. Their requirement was to work with a process-oriented software system that was efficient and flexible to enable the Metis staff to be fully in control. However, that was not on the market.
https://partners.home.mendix.com/link/projects/319