This blog is about the 'Building Systems of Differentiation: How Zilveren Kruis Achmea Adopted Low-Code to Digitalize Operations' video, presented by Hans Voorthuijzen from Achmea and Hans de Visser from Mendix. You can watch the video here.
As CLEVR, it is an honor to have been part of that journey for the last 3 years, helping Hans Voorthuijzen set up and build the Mendix team and practice.
Hans has explained the Mendix position within the IT landscape at Zilveren Kruis Achmea in the Gartner System of Differentiation IT Delivery layer.
After the first Mendix project, Zilveren Kruis decided to use Mendix in a more structured way (instead of project based) and started their own Mendix practice by hiring in-house staff and selecting the right Mendix partner. Hans describes how, in his quest to figure out the right staff profile - a mixture of a business analyst and software engineer - a new Mendix Business Engineer role was born.
Hans’ recommendations for getting started with Mendix are:
- Do not underestimate the impact, it’s an interesting journey
- Choose a good partner that can support your journey with Mendix
- Select the right staff and isolate that staff to do other jobs
Hans learned from this journey that “tool selection is one, but organizing is two, and maybe it’s even the other way around.”
As Hans mentioned, one of the strategic decisions they made was to follow CLEVR’ recommendation and offer new team members proper Mendix training to become Mendix Business Engineers at the CLEVR Mendix Academy bootcamp. Hans is still pleased with his choice to go with a solid bootcamp and advises anyone looking to build a highly productive team from the very beginning to do the same.
You can read more about the journey that Zilveren Kruis Achmea and CLEVR have been on together here. In that showcase, Hans explained that “we needed a partner who could train, support, advise, and coach our people. But this partner should also be able to supply manpower if we ourselves do not have sufficient capacity to build the applications. The knowledge CLEVR people have and the type of people who work for the company ensure that business applications are delivered not only quickly, but also robustly.”
CLEVR is pleased to have been able to take on that role. A senior Mendix business Engineer from CLEVR co-created and coached Hans’ Mendix team, and they now have 15 Mendix apps (see picture above) up and running and realized € 5 Million value creation with Mendix (see picture below), and 5 more Apps soon to follow….
Thanks to that level of collaboration with CLEVR, Zilveren Kruis today is not only capable of building any class of low-code applications they may need, they are truly masters of their own business destiny.
Hans, thank you for this interesting journey so far and let’s continue on for years to come!
