DACHSER honored for successful app community

At DACHSER, 1,250 employees are already empowered to build applications themselves as citizen developers. The community continues to grow and makes a significant contribution to digitizing analogue processes independently, quickly and easily. The decentralized experts are highly committed to building solutions themselves on site and are constantly improving them.

Under the motto "away from the clipboard", DACHSER has already saved 7.1 million pages of paper in various processes, as many use cases can be built and digitized with the modular system. The Citizen Development approach not only contributes to digitalization, but also saves resources. For 7.1 million pages, the equivalent of 396,773 liters of water or 147,621 kWh of electricity is needed if recycled paper is used as the basis.

"We are very proud of the award for our growing global Citizen Development community," explains Jeanne Merswolken from the Digital Platform Products team in Corporate Digital Innovation & Development. "We still have a lot to do: There are still some paper-based processes in the company that can be digitized by the employees themselves. With the smapOne solution, we can enable them to do this. And what's more, building our own apps is fun, as the positive feedback from the company proves."

A no-code platform does not serve to create parallel worlds to existing systems, but supports applications and applications of Corporate IT at DACHSER and shows further potential for digitization.

"The aim is to strengthen the digital mindset of employees and promote digital creativity," says Jürgen Sakry, Department Head Shared Services. "Clear guidelines are important. The Citizen Developer Community at DACHSER is therefore trained and supported by a central audit team. The central team also ensures that all applications are of high quality and comply with data protection guidelines. Company templates are created to avoid redundant development."

How does empowerment work?

Citizen development is a business trend and an important part of the digital transformation. Employees who have no special IT or programming skills but are IT-savvy are given the opportunity to use development environments (so-called low-code/no-code platforms) to create applications themselves that add value to the company and optimize processes. These employees are known as "citizen developers".

The potential of these platforms was also examined by strategy consultancy Gartner in a recent study entitled "Harness the Disruptive Powers of Low-Code: A Gartner Trend Insight Report" and cites productivity increases and a reduction in resource constraints as advantages. Gartner predicts that around 70% of new applications will be built on low-code and no-code platforms by 2025, compared to less than 25% in 2020.