Siemens China Runs AI-Powered Production Scheduling and 170+ Other Apps Using Mendix Low-Code Solution on AWS

Siemens China optimized its processes, including core manufacturing, using more than 170 applications it built using a low-code application platform (LCAP) from Mendix. Mendix has been cloud native on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2016 and was acquired by Siemens, an AWS Partner, in 2018. It uses a visual, drag-and-drop interface instead of traditional code. Using Mendix, Siemens China has been able to deliver better software, faster. Professional developers are more productive and collaborate directly with business technologists, domain experts, and users in fusion teams. Siemens China has digitally transformed its shop floor, improved quality management, and built visibility and resilience into its operations.

Before the introduction of the Mendix LCAP built on AWS, Siemens China had time-consuming manual processes for many of its complex manufacturing operations. It was using Excel spreadsheets to manage production orders, schedule workers, and assign tasks at a team level. “Our legacy systems were very old, their process design wasn’t very good, and they were missing some key functions,” says Polly Zheng, solution manager at Siemens China IT. “Our internal teams wanted to improve the way we did things, and they wanted to use artificial intelligence for production scheduling.”

Soon after Siemens, an AWS Partner, acquired Mendix in 2018, the company started to use the Mendix LCAP internally for all sorts of apps and processes. Siemens China adopted the same strategy. As part of a sweeping digital transformation, it established a team to oversee the use of Mendix as well as data, artificial intelligence (AI), and related technologies. They named the team Dayu, after a hero in ancient China reputed for taming floods—just as Siemens China tames a flood of data today. The name is also an acronym for “Data, AI, and You.”

Given that a modern factory produces up to 2,200 TB of data per month, the team’s first priority was to collect and standardize all of this data. It built a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It also connected the data stored in Amazon S3 with data stored in SAP HANA, an in-memory database that Siemens China uses for data integration and harmonization for data from upstream systems. To automate the flow of data between Amazon S3 and SAP HANA, the Dayu team uses AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simpler to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development.

Once it had established this data foundation, the team began to build several Mendix apps. For file storage, the apps also use Amazon S3. Apps store data using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Mendix offers its Mendix Database Connector as a way to simply create and configure databases built on Amazon RDS to connect securely to Mendix apps. The apps’ compute workloads run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

Because Mendix is cloud native, each app is containerized so that it can be deployed nearly anywhere. Siemens China chose to deploy its apps in its own AWS environment using Mendix for Private Cloud. Mendix does this using Mendix on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the cloud or in on-premises data centers. Mendix on Amazon EKS is available to users who want to deploy, scale, and manage Mendix apps on AWS.

In January 2022, the Dayu team began to incorporate AI for intelligent data analytics into its Mendix apps. It turned to Amazon SageMaker, which developers can use to build, train, and deploy ML models for nearly any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. “Siemens China uses the combination of Mendix and AWS to optimize core manufacturing processes through intelligent automation,” says Maarten de Vries, AWS program manager at Mendix. “For Siemens China, AWS adds value by deploying Mendix apps at scale, and it adds intelligence to the apps that people make with low code.”

For example, the team built an app called Smart Production Scheduling. It features a 3D model of the production lines from Siemens China’s manufacturing plants, including modules that provide visibility into granular details of workflows. The app also transfers production order confirmations and related data automatically via SAP web service. Users access a visual dashboard to monitor the current status, delivery risks, personnel, and many other details of production scheduling. They track key materials by serial number, manage subcontractors, and assign and monitor tasks by individual worker or by team.

Another example is the Smart Customer Service app, which automates 12 complete customer service workflows that previously relied on manual data entry. Using the Smart Customer Service app, Siemens China records working hours, tracks materials used, and generates automatic email notifications. Using automated workflows built on AWS in the background, the app produces more efficient customer-service processes. “We saved the customer service team a lot of manual work, not only in how it works but also in terms of reporting,” says Zheng. “We’ve actually helped the team to clarify their processes.”

Using Mendix, Siemens China averages just 2–3 months to develop an app and go live with it. “That’s very fast,” says Zheng, “and part of that speed is due to the reuse of existing apps and components.” The Dayu team built up an internal digital platform for Siemens employees, and the app store and marketplace collect more than 170 ready-to-use apps and many reusable components. “Our internal team uses these apps and components all the time,” says Zheng. “Now, we’re also helping our Siemens China business and sales units and factories to build apps too.”

Each of the more than 170 apps that Siemens China has built depends on high-quality data and delivers some form of business value, whether it’s reducing cost and risk, increasing customer satisfaction, or a combination. It’s not always easy to quantify the value, but some apps have definitely increased work efficiency by at least 20 percent.

With feedback from its internal teams, the Dayu team works continuously to improve its Mendix applications. It also plans to continue publishing apps as standard products and assisting other internal teams in unleashing the value of data by quickly building and implementing applications. “AWS services deeply contribute to our team’s daily work,” says Zheng. “Our users see great value from the apps and functions that we publish using Mendix on AWS.”