allabor network
web marketing

Dachser again honored for its successful app community

  • Two warehouse workers inspect and discuss stacked boxes inside a shipping container. One holds a handheld device while the other points toward the cargo.

With this award, smapOne AG recognizes the logistics service provider's success in creating a global community of employees who develop their own applications without programming knowledge, thereby driving digitalization within the company.

Dachser has once again been honored with the Citizen Development Empowerment Award.

At Dachser, more than 1,000 employees already have the ability to develop applications themselves as citizen developers. The community continues to grow and is making a significant contribution to the digitization of analog processes independently, quickly, and easily. The decentralized experts are highly committed to developing solutions independently at their locations and continuously improving them.

Using the motto "moving away from paper," Dachser has already saved 10.2 million pages of paper across various processes, as many use cases can be developed and digitized with the modular system. The Citizen Development approach not only contributes to digitization but also saves resources. For 10.2 million pages, 570,012 liters of water or 212,075 kWh of electricity would be required if recycled paper were used as the base.

"We are very proud of this recognition of our growing global Citizen Development community," explains Jan Herzig, Team Lead Digital Platform Products at Corporate Digital Innovation & Development. "We still have a lot to do: there are still some paper-based processes in the company that employees can digitize themselves. With the smapOne solution, we can empower them to do this. And creating our own apps is fun, as evidenced by the positive feedback from the company."

A no-code platform isn't used to create parallel worlds to existing systems, but rather supports corporate IT applications and apps at Dachser, thus revealing greater potential for digitalization.

"The goal is to strengthen employees' digital mindsets and foster digital creativity," says Jürgen Sakry, Department Head of Shared Services. "Clear guidelines are important. That's why the Citizen Developer Community at Dachser receives training and support from a central audit team. This team also ensures that all apps are of high quality and comply with data protection regulations. Corporate templates are created to avoid redundant developments."

How does training work?

Citizen development is a business trend and a key part of digital transformation. Employees without specific IT or programming skills, but who are technologically savvy, are given the opportunity to use development environments (so-called no-code platforms) to create applications themselves that add value to the company and optimize processes. These employees are known as "citizen developers."