Cosun Beet Company (CBC) stands out as one of the most efficient sugar producers in Europe, delivering food, energy, and biowaste products across the continent. Their goal is to become the world’s greenest and most innovative sugar beet producer, a vision they aim to achieve by minimizing fossil fuel use and maximizing beet yields.

During Mendix World 2021, CBC’s ICT Manager, Wim Hummel, shared how the Mendix platform facilitated CBC’s adoption of an Agile approach to transform their software portfolio amid challenging times.

Simplifying Before Transitioning

CBC has been an SAP customer since 1989. With a looming SAP migration deadline of 2030, the organization faced several critical questions. “A migration of this scale is a daunting task. It demands a lot of energy, effort, and money,” Hummel explained. “It shifts our focus internally rather than on the customer.”

Migrating to a new ERP system is a complex endeavor not unique to CBC. Legacy ERP systems encompass decades of customizations that mirror an enterprise’s unique processes and capabilities. Each of these customizations must be recreated in the new ERP system, necessitating substantial time, resources, and expertise. Reflecting the challenge, only 16% of SAP customers have transitioned to S/4HANA.

Despite having processes of low-to-medium complexity, CBC developed around 600 custom programs and components within SAP across two domains: Agriculture (supporting harvesting and processing) and Maintenance (supporting the growing season). Over the past 20 years, these builds and their maintenance have consumed about 40 person-years of effort. In preparation for migration, CBC aimed to simplify their processes and identify areas for innovation. “We innovate and simplify where it matters most to us, namely the tailor-made solutions,” Hummel noted.

CBC adopted an agile-based development workflow to enable rapid development, prototyping, and testing. They consulted internal IT staff and SAP consultants to determine if a low-code solution could help develop the end-user solutions they needed. “All the answers were positive,” Hummel enthused. CBC’s core developers estimated that using low-code would be five times faster than building SAP user interfaces.

Delightful User Experiences with Low-code Solutions

Since initiating the project in March 2019, CBC has externalized these ERP customizations, building them with Mendix to both simplify a future migration and deliver significant business value to end-users.

AGRIS (Agricultural Information System) is a solution used by CBC for planning, contracting, ordering, and payments. Initially built on SAP, the team developed a new solution in Mendix that connects to SAP for real-time data exchange. This single solution replaced many of CBC’s 600 custom SAP programs and provided a “jumpboard for future innovation,” as future versions of AGRIS will include access for CBC’s various stakeholders.

TIRA is another innovative solution designed to streamline plant and part maintenance. TIRA integrates with SAP Enterprise Asset Management and Project Management, enabling CBC staff to monitor equipment status, spare parts, and work orders. Staff can log malfunctions and observations directly into the application from any location, including mobile devices. TIRA replaced a set of custom SAP shell programs and, as Hummel highlighted, “provides a rich user experience and access everywhere.”

CBC also developed solutions for crop and storage advisory for their growers. By integrating data collected from field staff, open-source solutions, and a network of 600 IoT sensors, these applications offer personalized, localized advice to growers. “It helps us reduce the number of herbicides we need to use to keep our plants healthy while maintaining and even increasing yields,” Hummel explained. The reduction in herbicide use and decay in harvested stacks has advanced CBC’s ambition to maximize yields sustainably.

CBC further leveraged the Mendix platform to develop a Dock Planner, saving 600 workdays per year. This solution facilitates booking time slots at CBC docks for both staff and external vendors and partners. Hummel noted, “This helps us reduce waiting times at the docks and improves digital communication and data exchange.”

Enhancing Practices through Better Solutions

By deploying these solutions, CBC has significantly improved the user experience for internal and external stakeholders. “In the end, we’ve delighted our users,” Hummel exclaimed. CBC’s Mendix development team has doubled in size over the past two years, enabling further exploration of innovative possibilities.

Working with Mendix has greatly enhanced the speed and collaboration of CBC’s development process. Developers could create prototypes and gather stakeholder feedback swiftly, resulting in valuable input from end-users and making the development process enjoyable. “It brought the fun back into creation,” Hummel remarked.

To date, CBC’s efforts with Mendix have consolidated 250 of their 600 custom SAP solutions. They have also managed to reduce pesticide usage and waste within their beet growing operations, improve dock efficiency, protect crop yields worth €1.8 million annually, and develop more user-friendly, scalable technology solutions across the organization.

After over two years of using low-code, CBC’s developers revisited their initial prediction that low-code development would be five times faster. They discovered an even more astonishing result: sticking with SAP user interfaces would have allowed them to achieve only 15% of what they accomplished with Mendix.

Hummel advises other organizations facing similar challenges to CBC to adopt a curious approach: “Think big, create small.” For CBC, experimentation and feedback led to outstanding final products.

Photo by Dan Gold (unsplash.com)