Enexis Groep Delivers 100+ Apps in 2 Years with Mendix and AWS

One of the three major distribution grid operators in the Netherlands, Enexis Groep, needed to deploy applications that address today’s energy delivery challenges. Because the company had no in-house developers, it chose Mendix, a Siemens company and an AWS Partner to enable development speed, standardization, and governance. Using the Mendix low-code platform on AWS, agile delivery teams built more than 100 applications in two years, accelerated time to market, and reduced costs.

Created from a merger of multiple utility companies, Enexis Groep is responsible for delivering electricity and gas to 2.9 million customers in the Netherlands, mainly in the north and south. For years, Enexis relied on outsourced IT, which included a hosted data center, an on-premises ERP, and development as needed—primarily to keep the ERP updated.

Facing dramatic changes in the industry, a 100-year-old grid that must be updated to facilitate the energy transition, and new questions and ideas for digitalization, the company decided it was time to bring development in-house. “We needed to build smaller applications quickly for specific purposes, answer unique questions, and create custom add-ons to our big systems to help us move forward,” explained Michel Habets, lead architect (cloud) platforms and connectivity at Enexis Groep.

At first, teams at Enexis started building their own solutions, but that proved to be unsustainable. That’s when the company turned to AWS Partner Mendix, which offers a low-code application development platform. The plan was to use Mendix to develop a proof of concept (PoC) for a business-critical application that could address power outages faster by enabling both internal engineers and those in the field to communicate while working on an outage. While Enexis only intended on using Mendix to build the PoC, the team realized the Mendix platform allowed them to develop the functionality they needed.

Enexis was already leveraging AWS prominently in its IT landscape and saw the opportunity for faster delivery by deploying Mendix applications on AWS. This also allowed the Enexis team to take better advantage of their AWS framework that includes AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Kinesis, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Service Catalog, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Enexis has migrated about 25 applications from the Mendix Cloud to AWS Fargate. In the process, the Enexis team built an application that enables any developer with a graphical user interface to deploy an app as easily on AWS as they can on the Mendix Cloud.

In just two years, Enexis built more than 100 apps using Mendix on AWS. Currently, the company has multiple agile delivery teams working with Mendix for different strategic projects. Both the business and IT teams are pleased with the results and the speed of development, which some at Enexis estimate to be 20 times faster than traditional coding. “There are processes we want to do in a specific way. With Mendix and AWS, we can rapidly build applications ourselves that handle those processes,” explained Habets.

The migration of applications to AWS has enabled Enexis to streamline and accelerate additional workflows. In some cases, the increase in speed was 99 percent. “In the past, changing the firewall took six weeks. Now we can do it in six minutes or less,” said Habets. Infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, automated test checks, and more have replaced slower manual processes and a great deal of outsourcing.

Enexis relies on its SAP ERP system, so SAP integration is essential for more than one-third of the company’s applications. Many of these SAP integrations were built as reusable components using Mendix. In addition, Enexis has heavily customized its ERP system over the years but now it’s migrating to the latest version of SAP, called S/4HANA. In doing so, Enexis plans to go back to the standard to avoid customizations and keep the core clean as much as possible. Minor changes to the SAP Fiori user interface are permitted directly in SAP, but anything bigger is built in Mendix and integrated with SAP instead. To maintain an organized ecosystem of solutions, Enexis has a strict architecture governance process that ensures new applications are only built if there isn’t an existing solution available.

Using Mendix and AWS, Enexis has slashed its spending on application development in half. Operations savings are even more dramatic. Enexis estimates that those costs are only 20 percent of what they used to be—because applications built with Mendix improve processes.

With the speed provided by Mendix and scalability of AWS, the future looks bright for Enexis. The company is managing mission-critical processes with its Mendix-built applications, ensuring millions of people have the utilities they need. Enexis is well equipped to adapt to changing market conditions and deliver reliable service—laying the groundwork for business growth.