Driving Trade into the Future

Background

Founded in 1979, AEB is a leading software provider for the global trade and logistics industry, with more than 5,000 customers across the world relying on AEB products and solutions to power their logistics workflows.

The logistics industry is characterized by complex rules and regulations, governing imports and exports across international borders, leading companies to build deep business process knowledge over many years.

Business processes in intra-logistics and customs are often similar in different industries, whether in production or logistics. However, it is clear that the individual process solutions that organizations have built over time act as important differentiators for companies among their competitors.

Automating these deeply customized processes with off-the-shelf software leads to poor solutions and user dissatisfaction. But individual software solutions developed specifically for companies are unreasonably expensive.

A Customizable Solution

Like every business, the production and logistics industries are facing intense pressure to modernize. Constant optimization of processes is necessary to maintain and differentiate a company in the face of ever-tougher competition.

AEB saw an opportunity to adapt a trend it is deeply familiar with as a software company: creating process automation applications that are easy to use, easy to adapt, and can be understood and operated intuitively by people with little technical expertise. This would enable companies to take control of their business processes – creating, managing and running their workflows.

The solution needed to be fast and incredibly flexible, allowing development teams to quickly scale and manage their own build pipelines. AEB needed to bring software and business together, empowering users no matter their technical knowledge.

Building for the Future: nEXt

In order to provide the best solutions to users, under constantly changing conditions, AEB developed nEXt – a highly customizable developer framework for process driven applications, which provides higher standards in flexibility and adaptability for the individual processes of each customer.

Running with Camunda for both BPMN and DMN, processes, apps, data models, and APIs can be configured and adjusted to a large extent – without downtime. Meanwhile numerous tools and collections of reusable components integrated into the AEB cloud platform support both the creation of individual User Interfaces and the implementation of business logic.

Results

The great strength of the nEXt platform is its flexibility – it is lightweight and highly adaptable for any individual process. Camunda enables this through flexible orchestration across endpoints, people and systems.

Camunda’s architecture, which is agile and highly scalable and can be easily integrated with other architectures and frameworks, also makes a significant contribution to this flexibility. While at the same time, it does not require development teams to build from scratch – saving considerable time and effort for all stakeholders.

nEXt also requires barely any training, documentation, or familiarization, so users are able to quickly learn and operate the application – leading to greater efficiency gains compared to traditional “all-purpose applications” which are more suitable for exception handling and complex processing.