Case Study

Transforming the Way Employees Work at Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric Backstory

Founded in 1836, Schneider Electric is a leader in energy and automation digital solutions for efficiency and sustainability. The company continues to serve its customers by innovating energy solutions for key areas such as buildings, data centers, industry and infrastructure.

The Challenge

With over 135,000 employees worldwide in more than 100 countries, Schneider Electric is proud to enable its employees to be more productive by becoming more autonomous. Seeing that virtually all technologies are available in the cloud and are becoming easier to use by business users, the Digital team saw the opportunity to leverage these new technologies across Schneider Electric. “New digital products allow us to be much more efficient than we used to be,” said Jamie Locks, VP of Integration & Middleware at Schneider Electric, “which helps our company create a competitive advantage. Through new digital technologies, business teams become more agile, leading to reduced time-to-market, and lower cost and complexity.”

Previously, business teams across the company relied on the centralized Professional Services team (Center of Excellence), a group within the Digital team dedicated to developing applications for them. As more and more business teams across the world were requesting more application development, this approach proved to be resource and time intensive for both business and Professional Services teams. As a result, the Digital team undertook a digital transformation initiative to transform their Operating Model to enable citizen developers to build their own applications and gain more control over their application development.

The Solution

In order for the Operating Model to empower teams and become more autonomous, they needed to ensure that these citizen developers applied the right standards, architecture, design and cybersecurity rules while safeguarding data governance. As a result, the Digital team sought for an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that could help them achieve their Operating Model.

After evaluating different integration vendors, Schneider Electric selected SnapLogic as the iPaaS that powers the Digital team’s new Operating Model. The Model is composed of three support tiers: Close Support, Light Support and Autonomous. Instead of having the Professional Services team develop all the assets, the Digital team enables citizen developers to build their own assets with step-by-step support. In the Light Support tier, citizen developers build their own assets with some level of support. Citizen developers who are certified and comfortable building their own assets receive minimal support. All of the citizen developers have access to the SnapLogic platform to build their applications.

“The goal of this new Operating Model is to encourage citizen developers to move along the curve to have the highest autonomy,” said Locks. “SnapLogic is the foundation of this model, enabling citizen developers to easily integrate apps, data, and APIs, fast-tracking the entire development cycle and going to market faster.”

The Business Result

Since implementing the new Operating Model, the Digital team has enabled nearly 150 citizen developers and has integrated more than 100 systems across Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain and other departments to build more than 80 integration pipelines to date. With employees increasing autonomy, they are empowered to serve customers, wherever they are, at a much faster speed, resulting in higher business impact and innovation.

“Business teams are now in the driver’s seat, having more control over their own projects and initiatives,” said Locks. “Citizen developers are more productive and autonomous all while driving down development costs and the need for specialized resources using SnapLogic.”