Mendix announced that Mendix Workflow for process automation is now generally available for global enterprises building end-to-end digital solutions on the low-code platform. Workflow's public rollout features enhanced architecture and new capabilities fine-tuned during extensive beta testing. Available in both Mendix Studio and Mendix Studio Pro developer environments, Workflow enables greater collaboration between business experts and IT professionals to design, build, and optimize business processes with enterprise-wide automation.

Using the visual modeling language of the Mendix low-code platform, Workflow seamlessly integrates user-centric and system tasks, data, and third-party services to digitize processes across the enterprise's application landscape. In addition, Workflow Commons, a module available from the Mendix Marketplace, provides customizable, ready-to-use templates, pages, dashboards, and smart services to kick-start intelligent automation across the enterprise.

The strategic impact of end-to-end process automation

Workflow's strategic importance is validated by Deloitte research  that documents how "automation supercharges digital transformation." As one of the pillars of intelligent automation, low-code Workflow makes cloud-native scalability and faster deployments possible with fewer resources, achieving competitive advantage in today's digital-first economy. 

Prior to Mendix Workflow, event-driven digitization has been difficult to manage and scale across the enterprise. Forrester reports that business-critical process automation remains in early stages, with nearly 77% of enterprises relying on paper processes and email and 63% dependent on Excel programs and spreadsheets. 

Gartner analysts underscore the economic imperative to automate complex business processes, citing this feature as a "critical component" when evaluating a low-code platform. Additional Gartner findings say the need by enterprises to scale hyper-automation will be one of the top three drivers of low-code adoption through 2022.

"Mendix has implemented Workflow as a core capability within the platform," said Hans de Visser, vice president, product management, R&D at Mendix. "It's not a bolted-on feature for point solutions like robotic process automation or business process management software, but an integrated, native capability. Workflow Editor offers enterprise-wide visibility and notifications on automated processes throughout the organization, storing execution data in a standard, accessible format. And it frees developers from reinventing the wheel by reusing defined processes and core business data, leveraging the same process-driven governance, control, and oversight that infuses every solution developed on the Mendix enterprise low-code platform."

As an integrated, core capability in the Mendix platform, Mendix Workflow empowers citizen developers to collaborate and build applications, implementing business processes as they evolve and change. Industry analysts, recognizing the platform's robust support for hyperautomation, composable business, and democratization of software development, have named Mendix a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Enterprise Application Platforms five years in a row. Mendix has also been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development for three straight years.

Delivering value and agility for global enterprises 

Mammoet, a global market leader in heavy-lifting logistics and transportation, leveraged Mendix's approach to process automation to expedite and rationalize IT support and system functionality across operations in 45 countries. 

"The Mendix platform allowed Mammoet to integrate backend SAP data with digital work orders, timesheet collection, yard and warehouse supply checklists, and requests for engineering support," said Gerrit Dekker, Mammoet's CIO. "We look forward to leveraging Mendix Workflow. Already, the successful deployment of process automation has brought new efficiencies to our global operations. It also enables ongoing innovation by automating CO2 reporting data from our installed base of IoT sensors and devices."

Jumpstarting intelligent automation's benefits with end-user services

The new Workflow Commons module offers common design patterns  to make it fast and easy to add powerful workflow capabilities, including preconfigured templates to create a "task inbox" and other easily implemented pages to define custom workflow actions; dashboards for end-user and KPI monitoring; plus snippets and connectors to integrate data with automated processes. Additional automated services that enable fast iteration, are downloadable now from the Mendix Marketplace. They include specialized document processing, translation across languages, speech-to-text conversion, sentiment text analysis, and plug-and-play OCR.

"Solving the pain points of digitizing and automating business processes is a central concern of every enterprise CIO, especially given the shortage of developer talent," said Johan den Haan, chief technology officer at Mendix. "Our integrated approach closes the gap between the lived reality for many organizations, where the flow of business logic resides with individual stakeholders - making auditing and optimizing processes very difficult - and IT's ability to offer support and oversight. Workflow Editor captures and documents tacit institutional knowledge that can be tested and verified through the DevOps testing cycle."