Rapidly modernizing advanced Lotus Notes apps

Their challenges

• The customer, like many other manufacturers, had been struggling to automate non-standard and dynamic business processes.
• These business processes were not out-of-the-box solutions but hard-coded and challenging to change in their Lotus Notes applications.
• Note that the customer had 1,000+ Lotus Notes applications and 250+ servers which required maintenance.

• This resulted in high license and maintenance costs for the office infrastructure.
• There was also a strong business need to facilitate the knowledge workers and their dynamic business processes, with workflow-oriented applications.
• The applications were required to be responsive, available anywhere anytime, and running on the latest tablet and smartphone models.

Our solutions

• Together with Rappit, the customer designed an approach for flexible workflow apps in the cloud on top of their enterprise core systems. Rappit was chosen as a worldwide partner to develop these web-based workflow apps on Google Cloud, which are integrated into their on‐premise back-end systems.
• Rappit used its productivity improvement framework to accelerate the development of these advanced applications. This also included back-end and front-end optimizations to scale for a high number of transactions and users. An example is the enterprise-wide Quality Incident Management application with 20,000 users in total.

• The app is a mission-critical workflow app to respond to customer incidents. The incidents are related to the automobile parts that were sold to their customers. Each incident has to be analyzed, and a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) needs to be done. It also requires a root cause analysis, and Lessons Learning Cards (LLC) to be created and tracked for implementation on all sites that may have similar issues and to prevent recurrence in the future.
• The application uses Google BigQuery as the analytical database for dashboarding.