Enexis

About Enexis

Whether you’re a healthcare professional, a machine operator, a Gen AI prompt engineer, an Instagram influencer, or a stay-at-home dad or mom, almost everything we use to perform and register work, consume and enjoy content, runs on electricity. Without it, the world would come to a stop real fast. 

Enexis is a Dutch regional grid operator that builds, operates, and maintains the electricity and gas distribution networks across Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Noord-Brabant, and Limburg. Their vision is a carbon-neutral society by 2050 with a safe and reliable energy supply for everyone. They help shape the future energy system and invest in dependable infrastructure to keep the transition feasible and affordable. 

They power nearly three million homes and businesses, with approximately 3.0 million electricity connections and about 2.27 million gas connections. Their footprint is extensive, spanning roughly 200,000 kilometers of the energy grid. Each year, they transport around 33 terawatt hours of electricity and about 4,229 million cubic meters of gas. Behind this system stands a skilled workforce of approximately 6,000 people. 

They transport energy from producers to households and businesses, connect new and existing customers, plan and expand grid capacity, and perform maintenance and upgrades to prevent outages and ensure safety. They provide transparent communication, coordinate with municipalities, industry, and energy producers, and use data and digital solutions to maximize available capacity without overloading the grid. Through these actions, they enable decentralized, sustainable growth while keeping service predictable and trustworthy. 

Challenges & the Energy Transition

Enexis wants to help its customers transition into a sustainable future, supported by smart physical solutions as well as smart applications. Due to the heavy demand on the current energy grid, the ongoing energy transition, and a shortage of skilled technical talent, Enexis must optimize how it plans and deploys its mechanics to build, maintain, and expand the energy grid. At the same time, they need to ensure transparent communication and smart support for their customers. 

To be able to quickly react to requirements from Enexis’ internal business departments, external partners, and customers, Enexis decided to use the Mendix low-code application development platform in 2014. Since then, Enexis has used Mendix to develop over 140+ applications to streamline its operational processes and to build out a scalable, future-proof IT landscape. 

Enexis uses Mendix to quickly develop new digital tools for all business units, from resource planning to finance and health, safety and environmental departments. Furthermore, they’ve used the Mendix platform strategically to help replace legacy systems and to quickly connect to existing ERP and CRM systems. 

Enexis and The Orange Force: Digital Partners 

Since the start of the partnership between Enexis and The Orange Force, The Orange Force has continuously provided multiple of its best Mendix developers, a chief architect overlooking the Mendix landscape as part of the Mendix Center of Excellence (platform team responsible for scaling and maintaining Mendix), a UX/UI lead expert to build and work on various applications to meet Enexis’ needs, and an experienced Mendix Certified Trainer to support the Enexis Mendix CoE in training its new developers. 

Most of the applications that The Orange Force’s developers work on proactively solve and prevent disruptions in the energy grid, optimize customer interaction, and improve the internal process flow with the main goal of making operations run faster and more efficiently. These applications are crucial because disruptions in the energy grid can leave customers without warmth and electricity, whereas an inefficient internal process flow can cost a lot of time and money. 

Here are some examples of successful collaborations between Enexis and The Orange Force: 

Building and shaping  Enexis’ Mendix Center of Excellence 

One of the cornerstones of our collaboration with Enexis has been the establishment of their Mendix Center of Excellence (CoE), internally known as the Low Code Application Platform (LCAP) team. At the heart of this initiative stands our Chief Architect, who has been deeply embedded within Enexis for over nine years. As one of the driving forces behind this transformation, he has shaped the vision, architecture, and operational model that enables Enexis to continuously innovate with speed, quality, and confidence. 

The mission of the LCAP team is to reduce cognitive load for Enexis’ developers by standardizing and centralizing essentially everything they collectively need, such as processes, tools, and services, from ensuring NIS2 security and compliance to building and managing the Mendix deployment environment on the Enexis private cloud. 

Today, the LCAP team stands as an example within Enexis, and its success has contributed to the creation of additional platform teams for software development. What makes this achievement exceptional is that few organizations have built and sustained their own Mendix CoE, yet Enexis has done so with remarkable success. This collaboration showcases how strong architectural leadership and a clear platform vision can create lasting impact and enable digital transformation at scale. 

KAI: Simplifying and shortening the Customer Intake Process 

As a key provider of energy, gas, and warmth to households in the Netherlands, it is vital for Enexis to continuously improve its services to keep customers happy. In order to achieve this, the Enexis Intake Portal system, which was used for handling customer requests, needed to be transformed.  

The Enexis Intake Portal kept up with all incoming private sector customer requests, providing an overview including tasks that needed to be completed in order to have Enexis’ engineers handle the request successfully. As the Enexis Intake Portal had been in use for years, it had technical limitations and was no longer able to handle the increasing volume of customer requests. Furthermore, the portal wasn’t able to adapt to the evolving processes of the ongoing energy transition. Therefore, the decision was made to transition the Enexis Intake Portal to a new architecture that includes the Mendix low-code platform, improving the customer intake process and ensuring successful execution by Enexis’ engineers.  

The new Mendix application called KAI (Kleinverbruik Aansluitingen Intake) is a highly efficient all-round application that effectively provides real-time insights into customer requests. The application enables users to view and manage the current status of customer requests, evaluate and process, access customizable search, filter, and viewing options for streamlined navigation, and view task-specific information in a concise and actionable format. Additionally, KAI allows employees to add notes, upload files, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) through charts and graphs. 

Overall, KAI enhances operational efficiency, ensuring Enexis can meet the demands of its dynamic work environment and better serve its customers. 

Photo: Enexis Groep

BMR 2.0: An intuitive, mobile workhorse to ensure quality and safety in the field 

A key part of Enexis’ internal operations is having its mechanics check specific energy stations to make sure external contractors deliver them as agreed upon. To do this, the mechanics take pictures of key parts of the energy station with their mobile phones. Initially, a different Mendix application called BMR1.0 was used for this. However, this application wasn’t user-friendly, which is why most personnel refrained from using it. This led to some departments collecting the pictures on SharePoint, whereas others uploaded them into Word. It wasn’t always clear which parts needed to be photographed.  

Using Mendix, the BMR 2.0 application was developed to streamline this process. This application automates part of the task preparation and planning process. Planners select the energy station, and the system automatically translates this into tasks for the mechanics, including a list of key parts that need to be photographed.  Mechanics can follow this list, and the data processor checks everything to make sure the mechanics have documented, measured, and photographed everything, preventing multiple visits to the same energy station, thus saving a lot of time. 

Our UX/UI lead expert played a vital role in the development of this application. By interviewing the end-users, he collected vital data on their needs and wants, which he then implemented in the creation of low – and high-fidelity designs and clickable prototypes. This provided the foundation of what the application should be and enabled the development team to work on the important and correct things. In the end, the UX/UI lead expert gathered all the resources he had collected and developed the front end of the responsive Mendix app to suit the user’s needs.

Duaal Tijd Schrijven: A tale of two (SAP) worlds – Streamlining the crucial process of correct Time registration 

Enexis always successfully relied on SAP for the time registration process of its employees. However, when Enexis decided to migrate from its previous SAP system (SAP R3) to a new one (SAP S4/HANA), a challenge arose.  Because the SAP migration takes multiple years, the data required to enable time registration is partially still present in the previous system and partially already migrated to the new SAP system. This makes it difficult for mechanics to know which hours need to be registered in the previous system and which go in the new system. In order to register time correctly, both SAP R3 and SAP S4/HANA systems needed to be connected, combining the data. To do this, the new Duaal Tijd Schrijven application was developed in Mendix on top of SAP.  

Enexis made the decision to use Mendix for this because Mendix is faster and easier to integrate on top of SAP compared to other possible solutions, even from SAP itself. At the same time, Mendix is perfect for adding customization, such as extra time registration filters, making sure the core in SAP is kept clean. 

This Duaal Tijd Schrijven application automatically links the registered times to relevant metadata such as project tasks, order numbers, and work breakdown structure (WBS) tasks. If new information is added to a time registration, the system also validates the data according to the specific rules for that system and automatically stores this information in the right system, being either SAP R3 or SAP S4/HANA. This enables employees to register their time in a clear, efficient, and user-friendly way, taking less time and preventing data errors. On the other hand, managers can use the system to obtain a clear overview of their team and the registered hours, making the process of approving time registration a lot easier and faster. At the moment, the application is used by around 4000 employees and managers, providing the key solution for Enexis during their migration. 

Helping Enexis grow its Mendix Center of Excellence 

A Mendix Certified Trainer provides official training, guidance, and mentoring to new Enexis Mendix developers when Enexis’ own training capacity is limited. He makes sure the trainees develop the skills needed to develop applications according to the highest industry standards that fit Enexis’ needs.  

Results & Impact

After years of successfully working with Mendix, Enexis has established an extensive Mendix landscape consisting of over 140 applications to schedule and perform work for their primary business processes. The Mendix landscape is part of a state-of-the-art, highly performing, and secure IT landscape, interconnected with many third-party systems like SAP ERP, CRM, data platforms such as Matillion and Snowflake, and physical IoT sensors. 

Overall, The Orange Force supports Enexis on all fronts to successfully expand its digital transformation by advancing and improving its IT landscape. On a development level, our team contributes by developing user-friendly, innovative solutions for Enexis and its customers. Additionally, on an architectural level, our Chief Architect helps secure the enterprise architecture and ensures the security, scalability, and performance guidelines are met. Enexis typically trains its own Mendix developers, but when needed, our team assists by providing training that meets top standards and best practices.