We were looking for a technology that would allow us to continuously develop our app suite based on customer requirements.

Joche Ganz

Head of the New Business & Innovation unit at the Weinig Group

70 %

faster

50 %

Reduction

50 %

Savings

Digitalization in the woodworking machinery sector

Megatrends such as digitalization and automation are not going unnoticed, even in industries with a long tradition such as the woodworking trade. At the same time, digital services offer mechanical engineering companies in particular the opportunity to maintain close contact with customers even after the sale.

The WEINIG Group is a manufacturer of woodworking machinery. Its portfolio covers the entire process chain from the sawmill to end products such as windows and profile strips. In 2015, WEINIG released the first version of the App Suite. This offers end customers free functions such as general information on existing machinery, calculation tools such as angle and planing step calculators and an additional channel for support requests to WEINIG Service. In addition, monitoring functions can be booked for a monthly fee, which make the current and historical machine status or the progress of production orders more transparent. This app was developed by an external service provider in 2015 and has been regularly adapted and expanded in recent years.

As the app was created proprietarily, it was previously very difficult to integrate the desired new functions, as any changes always involved a great deal of time and enormous costs. In future, WEINIG does not want to have to call on a service provider for every change request, but wants to be able to add as many new functions as possible and implement adjustments quickly and easily.

In addition, the app needed to be more modular, which made role and rights management necessary. The required interfaces – for example to Salesforce – needed to be easy to integrate.

With low-code, WEINIG wanted to be able to create the required solutions largely autonomously. All the advantages that low-code platforms bring with them were to be used for the further development of the app.

Simplifier has rebuilt the app in its essential functions. As part of this, the user interface has been modernized and navigation has been made much clearer. Another advantage of the new App Suite is the simplified user administration. This makes it possible to offer a demo version and assign individual app functions to each app account. The assignment between the app account and the customer and machine inventory data is done via Salesforce.

A WEINIG software architect was involved in the process and trained in the key Simplifier features. As a result, he is now able to implement the applications required by WEINIG himself. In this way, the growing customer requirements can be met even better.

WEINIG has a future-proof technological advantage thanks to the Simplifier low-code platform. This saves WEINIG time and money, as the required applications can be developed much faster thanks to the prefabricated elements of Simplifier and no longer require highly paid external service providers. In addition, quality is kept high thanks to tested programming codes.

This allows the mechanical engineering specialist to set itself apart from the competition by being able to add new functions to its app as quickly as possible. WEINIG was able to present this approach at Ligna 2019 (the world’s leading trade fair for woodworking and wood processing) in Hanover.

The WEINIG App Suite is available as a stand-alone app in the Apple App Store for iOS and Android and as a browser application at www.weinig.app

WEINIG wants to continue to make everyday work in wood processing easier in the future by continuously expanding the WEINIG App Suite and thus be an even stronger partner for the customer even after the machines have been sold. In addition, the low-code platform Simplifier will also be used internally to optimize processes, which is no problem thanks to the role and rights management that has already been implemented.

In addition, the company is able to continuously add new functions that make customers’ day-to-day work easier.