DEVOPSdigest

Mendix announced that Mendix Workflow for process automation is now generally available.

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.

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.

"Mendix has implemented Workflow as a core capability within the platform," said Hans de Visser, VP, 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."

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, CTO 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."