Econic digitises entire value chain and field services ecosystem using Mendix and CLEVR

Dutch e-homes service provider Econic deployed the Mendix enterprise low-code platform to build a field service and business-operations solution to digitise and streamline all business-critical workflows. The solution accelerates the energy transition for homes and uses low-code technology to combat global warming and promote sustainability.

The new 'Eos' platform, named after the Greek goddess of dawn, supports Econic's mission to make every house an e-home. This is a sustainable and comfortable house that is fossil-free and generates its own electricity. A digital environment was created to support this mission, including customised apps and portals for various stakeholders such as homeowners, project managers, Econic employees and contractors. With Eos, they can manage all orders, deliveries, assets, quotes, contracts and invoices, resulting in process efficiency, transparency and a huge acceleration of the energy transition in the housing sector.

“CLEVR designed Eos, a unified system providing overview, insight and seamless workflows for all business-critical processes.”

CLIMATE GOALS
By signing the Glasgow Climate Pact at the 2021 United Nations Climate Conference, countries around the world committed to making the 2020s a decade of climate action and support. One of the pact's goals is to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 45% by 2030. As a contribution to this, Econic has developed an innovative concept that helps homeowners, contractors and building associations to strongly accelerate the transition to all-electric e-homes, so that consumers' carbon footprint can be drastically reduced.

To do this, Econic had to digitise the entire value chain and field services ecosystem.
"We wanted to go ten times faster without sacrificing scalability or customer experience," says Mike Out, Econic's head of digital strategy & customer experience. "We knew that developing a platform in the traditional way was not an option and we were already familiar with low-code. However, we have very specific requirements, since Econic has a special proposition that offers the full range of services for energy transition - from advisory to implementation. After reading Forrester and Gartner reports on low-code vendors and after hearing various successful use-cases, our team selected the Mendix enterprise low-code platform."

OPERATING SYSTEM FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION
At Econic, they refer to Eos as the operating system for the energy transition. And like any good operating system, it has to be able to integrate many different systems. "We had to integrate such applications as Power BI, MessageBird, Exact, Zendesk, Aircall and various data-monitoring solutions," says Out.

"Mendix makes it very easy to integrate systems from our logistics partner while using data from our smart meters for analysis in order to serve our customers better."

CLEVR, a Mendix partner, advised Econic's business team during the transformation of a value chain and ecosystem that historically were not digital. To meet Econic's needs, CLEVR designed Eos, a unified system providing overview, insight and seamless workflows for all business-critical processes. These processes range from planning work orders to digital signature, online scheduling, quotation tooling, inventory management and invoicing.

The platform also offers five bespoke portals for various stakeholders, including homeowners, project managers, Econic employees and contractors. "The Mendix platform enables us to build unique solutions, making an ERP system redundant. In fact, it provides us with a workflow machine that enables us to digitise 90% of our processes, allowing us more time to think about new, smart solutions to further improve the customer experience," says Out.

TWICE AS MANY E-HOMES INSTALLATIONS
Eos was built in just four months and the migration to the new platform went seamlessly. Econic can now accelerate the energy transition considerably by doing twice as many e-home installations per day. It provides value to partners and customers thanks to more intelligent management of resources and lower costs. Customer service employees can also handle twice the number of tickets. "Thanks to the flexibility and adaptability of low-code, we can build a more efficient operation and a pixel-perfect experience for our customers and field service engineers, which can be optimised continuously", says Out.

By using the Mendix application, Econic can also deliver projects completely digitally. That’s why Eos offers such features as digital video inspection and smart forms that make its processes transparent, data-driven and scalable, resulting - ultimately - in increased customer satisfaction. The most recent addition to Eos is a modular e-home configurator in which consumers can compose and personalise their own e-home.

'WE ARE A DIGITAL COMPANY'
"The fact that internal stakeholders at Econic quickly transformed their initial idea from 'it's an IT project' to 'we are a digital company' illustrates an important benefit of the Mendix platform for transforming and modernising the enterprise," said Hans de Visser, VP of product management at Mendix. "We take great pride in contributing to Econic's goal of leading the energy transition in the housing market. And we are eager to see what other innovative features their development team will add to the platform in the future."

"We can be an example to the sector by doing things differently and by going faster and further than anyone else," says Joris Jonker, Econic's CEO.

"Energy and installation companies are trying to offer experiences like ours, but they struggle because combining all these elements in a single platform is quite complicated. "With Eos, we can share the blueprints of our success and offer the platform to our partners, possibly even to our competitors.

For now, we're focused on our ambitious plans, including making certain modules available on the Mendix Marketplace for others to use."