Case of success, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation – Low-Code

The division dedicated to the Space Industry of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation -Kamakura Works - more than doubled their productivity and streamlined management of your Systems Department of Information together to WeING Co., Ltd. technology with Low-Code.

Mitsubishi Electric is one of the world's leading manufacturers of components for satellites, that's why a few years expanded his production in Kamakura Works to provide manufacturers of satellite panels, solar array, structural panels and antennas.

In turn, Kamakura Works serves as the Department of Information Systems, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, where the company is in charge of developing internally all the computer systems used in the office, taking full advantage of the latest technology available.

In the following case, we explore all the details that resulted in the election of GeneXus for part of the Department of Information Systems, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Kamakura Works, explaining why they decided to adopt technology Low-Code via GeneXus, and G. RAD.E (GeneXus Rapid Application Development Environment) to further increase your productivity in 2018.

Information systems Kamakura Works

The Section on Information Systems of the Department of Management of Manufacturing Kamakura Works, is responsible for the maintenance and management of all the computers, servers, and networks used in the factory, as well as the development and maintenance of the majority of the systems used in it. In this way, the company Mitsubishi Electric Information Network Co., Ltd. it is recognized not only as a systems integrator for Mitsubishi Electric, but also as an integrator of it systems for a wide range of industries.

Kamakura Works is a division that manufactures products from Mitsubishi Electric, and manage the orders in the sales department, the production and the tasks of the staff, so that this section develops and maintains all systems properly used in Kamakura Works, in addition to those that are common to all the company.

Constantly improve and perfect the system on the basis of proposals in cooperation with each department to improve the business operations.

Challenges

“Given that we devise and promote business solutions to our account instead of leaving them in the hands of the suppliers, we have always searched for and selected the best solution for the infrastructure and the development language in order to fit the system that is to be developed”

Hiromi Higashi, Team Leader of Kamakura.

Therefore, some of these systems, which were in the beginning of the latest technology, have become legacy systems as the technology progresses. We have also been developing with Java, but to further improve the productivity, investigated the development of Low-Code with GeneXus.

Licensing system, and other key points in the choice of GeneXus between a variety of platforms development Low-Code

“From the information we gather on the Internet, we picked a development platform that comply with the limitations inherent security to Kamakura Works, such as the inability to use the cloud, and in the end, GeneXus, and another tool for visual modeling were the two finalists. The decisive factor was the system of licenses. GeneXus charged for each license of development, while the tools of visual modeling charge by the user, and for each program that is developed,” explained Higasi. For those who develop many systems, GeneXus is trading options more cost-effective.

The capacity provided by GeneXus to reuse the SQL, stored procedures, and other assets of the system currently in use was also a key decision.

In addition, the freedom of choice of the operating system and the language of generation was another important factor, he points out that the development team of Kamakura. In that sense, to have cross-platform support and the possibility of choosing the language to generate for each software solution. The sustainability of order to migrate to a new environment with the same source code, without being overwhelmed by future changes to the operating system or in the database, was very attractive.

“With the mixture of multiple versions of databases and operating systems [that are used in Mitsubishi Heavy Industries], it is not practical to modify each program individually, because that would imply a lot of work”, they stressed.

"GeneXus charged for each license of development, while the tools of visual modeling charge for each program that is developed," he said. "For us to develop many systems, GeneXus, which charges by the number of developers, it is more efficient in terms of costs."

Adoption of GeneXus on the part of the computer Information Systems Kamakura Works and the study of templates to further increase the productivity

Kamakura Works adopted GeneXus in 2018. The following year, they began to develop the formal system, and as of July 2020, released a 7 systems.

“At that time, we were able to exchange ideas with other enterprise at an event in Japan called GeneXus Day”.

In the GeneXus Day, they knew about the possibility of using a product of templates as WorkWithPlus to further increase your productivity, and studied it with WeING Co., Ltd., at that time I had just a product launch infrastructure of templates called G. RAD.E (GeneXus Rapid Application Development Environment) using WorkWithPlus.

“We became interested in the development environment to G. RAD.And, its applicability in practice and its improvement of productivity, and we decided to evaluate it in a business that was scheduled to be developed in Java at that time,” told from the development team of Kamakura.

Real increase in productivity in G. R. A. D. E and challenges for the future in both methodology development

Table 1 shows the results of the evaluation of the system that had been expected to launch in JAVA and develop in G. RAD.E. Table 1 shows the results of the evaluation of each theme.

In terms of the evaluation sheet, some of the screens are more productive, and some of the functions are not so. This is because, as it was developed without prior knowledge, it took a little time to learn.

If you migrate the current system to GeneXus in exactly the same way it would take a long time, it will work better if it is developed using the templates provided.

“We have the impression that at a minimum will be 50% less than in Java. It is convenient to be able to automatically create parts of the code that would have to be implemented in Java, especially the part of standard output”.

“It was hard to create an environment with the limitations of own safety of Kamakura Seisakusho. It is necessary to standardize the procedures of development and release, but we should prepare ourselves to the development environment to G. RAD.E. In this sense, we are looking for a way to change the approach and methodology of traditional development in cascade to one that is more suitable for GeneXus + G. RAD.E. In addition, to establish a methodology for the development team is a challenge for the future”.

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