Workforce management (WFM) enables organizations to optimize employee productivity and manage costs. These practices are often cobbled together with makeshift tools, but a fit-for-purpose platform is a key enabler in effective workforce management.

As part of their ongoing transformation, ABN AMRO, a leading Dutch bank, has been implementing workforce management practices for many years. In 2023 they reached a tipping point where Excel sheets and off-the-shelf systems could not support their long-term aspirations.

ABN AMRO has been at the forefront of low-code development since 2017, successfully delivering solutions that manage processes from fraud prevention to sales intake. Faced with a pressing system need, they turned to Mendix for one of their most complex development endeavors yet.

Now, ABN AMRO has successfully delivered a custom workforce management solution with low-code at a fraction of the costs while being able to adapt to their specific needs – something that off-the-shelf solutions could not deliver. Today, they are rolling the solution out to hundreds of employees with a benchmark to improve workforce productivity by at least 2.5% percent by the end of 2026.

Optimizing Workforce Efficiency

Workforce management as a practice brings together a view of resources, employee skillsets, and capacity. Many contingencies impact how their time is allocated, such as vacation time, labor regulations, schedules, and project needs. These data points then impact decision-making across the organization.

“This information is used at a very strategic level to determine departmental budgets, how many people we need to hire, and to inform tactical decisions. We can prioritize when resources are limited, for example, whether it makes sense to process a certain operational case or focus on a sales call. Or, how to prioritize between clients,” said Rob Wesselink, Head of Workforce Management at ABN AMRO.

There are two categories of work that Wesselink’s team supports today:

• Real-time WFM, where resource allocation and prioritization are happening instantaneously. At ABN AMRO, this is most commonly a need for call center teams.
• Deferred WFM, refers to the planning and allocation of resources that occur in advance. At ABN AMRO, this is most commonly used for sales teams or back-office operations.

“Within WFM you find the optimal balance between client demand and capacity to provide the service. Almost any choice you make will affect other client requests or the capacity you have left,” said Moira Vogelzang, Capacity Manager at ABN AMRO.

A workforce management tool is typically seen as a core system. Similar to an ERP or CRM, the preference is to buy off-the-shelf given the complexity of the processes included.

Today, most off-the-shelf WFM solutions are geared towards real-time planning, with few options available for deferred. During ABN AMRO’s market evaluation, they found that the most robust WFM systems were too cumbersome for teams handling deferred actions.

“Deferred workforce management is still being done in very different systems. There is a lot of Excel planning and different ways of scheduling per department, so all very manual work. There are also some Excel VBA codes, and as a bank these are not really secure”, said Stijn Käller, a Business Developer in ABN AMRO’s Process Automation Grid.

To scale the implementation of workforce management for deferred teams, which is a more substantial portion of their workforce, ABN AMRO needed a fit-for-purpose system to support them.

Evolving the Low-Code Scope

Having used Mendix for over 8 years, ABN AMRO has seen the market and platform capabilities evolve substantially. At the same time ABN AMRO has undergone its own business transformation, thus evolving their perception and positioning of low-code development.

Mark Bus, the Lead Product Owner of Rapid Application Development at ABN AMRO, has observed these changes firsthand.

“From when we started, Mendix 7 was a completely different solution than Mendix 10 is today, and what will soon be Mendix 11. For example, the downside of our BPM solution is that it’s not full-stack, you still need to build your screens on top of it,” said Bus.

Over the years, ABN AMRO has also looked to Mendix to fill functional gaps in their off-the-shelf systems in the short-term while they wait for a vendor to roll out their desired feature, which can take years. In the same way that the aperture for Mendix has widened in the BPM space, it is now following a similar trend in the realm of systems of record.

“The latest development that I am starting to see in the build or buy conversation is what used to be obvious ‘buy’ decisions are being diverted towards ‘let’s build it ourselves.’ And Mendix is perceived as mature enough to handle these complex use cases. Workforce management is the first use case we have that is fitting this pattern,” said Bus.

Low-Code Handles High Complexity

While Mendix is not the only development tool in the ABN AMRO toolbox, it was deemed the best fit for developing the WFM system after going through the proper evaluation channels.

“There was a high need for this tool in our environment. After investigating many options, we decided to be bold and try to build it ourselves with Mendix. This is opening up discussions in the architectural area to see if we can actually build something with low-code that is this vital and will have such a long lifespan within the bank,” said Rianne Ballizany, an IT Lead for Process Automation at the bank.

Mendix stood out in this particular use case for its:

• Native visual development, which is complementary to the Agile way of working that ABN AMRO has adopted.
• Integration capabilities, which makes data from other systems – such as employee time off or sick leave – available and actionable.
• Modern UI/UX capabilities. Wesselink cites user adoption as a key hurdle in WFM rollouts. “Everything we deliver needs to be user-friendly, otherwise people will resist,” he said.
• Composability, where the team can reuse important aspects of past Mendix projects – such as design systems or security standards. They can also build common components within WFM that can be replicated across teams.
• Maintainability and sustainability. The modularity of Mendix allows the team to adjust as needed when new requirements inevitably come up, and faster than would be doable with traditional programming or something off-the-shelf.

“Each department is working in a slightly different way. They will do similar things, like planning, capacity management, and forecasting input, but they all do it slightly different. We are trying to standardize as much as possible, but by using Mendix we can tailor parts of the experience in an easier way,” said Michelle van den Hoek, Product Owner in the Process Automation Grid.

Delivering Workforce Management

ABN AMRO’s WFM application was rolled out in mid-2025 and has been well-received by business users so far.

“The biggest success is that we’ve incorporated the first fundamental elements of Workforce Management while keeping the application very intuitive for users,” said Wesselink.

The Worforce Management application serves two primary user groups:

• The planners, schedulers, and capacity managers who are responsible for building out schedules based on employee availability and other dependencies.
• The employees, who have a simpler view where they can see their assignments and schedule.

The application is integrated with ABN AMRO’s security system to ensure that the right permissions and views are available based on user roles. The Workforce Management application provides insight in needed hours per workflow and the available employees and their skill set.

“Whatever we deliver is tested by a group of stakeholders. We get feedback very fast so that we can make changes fast. There’s an ongoing feedback loop,” said van den Hoek.

Developing with Mendix allowed the team to iterate based on user feedback and incorporate features that made their work even easier, including:

• A calendar view with color coding (an upgrade from a standard list of names and hours).
• The ability to assign workflows to the calendars of employees based on their skillsets.
• Dynamic prioritization, where projects and assignments will automatically adjust based on the level of priority as it relates to the employee schedule.

“We asked the users to share their ideas and feedback with us. Once they see how good it looks, they are ready to dream for more,” said Vogelzang.

The team delivered a integration with Outlook and might explore integrations with other internal systems within the bank in a later state. As more data flows through the system, ABN AMRO can better use it to inform decision making.

Hybrid Governance: A Recipe for Success

The confidence to take on a use case as complex as workforce management with Mendix is the result of many years of strategic work from ABN AMRO’s technology teams. As off 2022, with the launch of the Process Automation Grid, ABN AMRO also implemented a hybrid governance model.

The Grid put ‘digital hubs’ in place across the organization to steer the digitalization of key domains, bringing together business and IT capabilities and looking at processes end to end. This aimed to address a scattered landscape where departments delivered applications solely to meet their own departmental needs.

“We had to come up with a model that puts end-users, decision makers, and development acting together. That was the starting point for the hybrid governance model.” said Pedro Gouveia, Director of Process Automation & Digitalization at ABN AMRO.

“We give the priority to the hub leaders, and what we [IT] do is take ownership on determining the ‘how.’ That starts with the intake process – whether we use Mendix, RPA, or something else. This also allows us to identify patterns and potential to reuse if different departments are requesting similar things,” he continued.

As part of this strategy, the Process Automation Grid has:

• Empowered fusion teams to work better together in an Agile and DevOps way.
• Educated business stakeholders and product owners on how to properly define their requirements.
• Established a value proposition team that specializes in guiding hub teams to ensure that those requirements meet their business objectives.

The result is more self-sufficient departmental teams that can move more quickly through development cycles, while still operating under the guidance and parameters set by a central team.

“Our organizational setup already encourages collaboration between IT and business. This is also the driving force behind Mendix, so these concepts play nicely together. Fusion teams and low-code development, that’s a great combination,” said Bus.

Technology Supports Business Strategy

The workforce management project marks a new chapter in ABN AMRO’s low-code story.

Making their platforms and operating models compatible will directly support the bank in its next phase of growth, where agility and digitalization are at the forefront. “We’re relentlessly tying everything that we do to the core strategies of the bank,” he continued.

Whether it is a permanent solution, like Workforce Management, or a stop-gap one, shrinking software development cycles frees up ABN AMRO’s team members to focus on more value-add work.

Since launching the Workforce Management application users are happy with the results and eager to see more. The team has many improvements on the horizon and will continue to adapt the system for their users at a much lower resource investment than would have otherwise been possible.

“I think people initially thought that we were crazy to do this because workforce management is very complex. Mendix was perceived as something that you could use for more simple automations, but not something with this many requirements and this scope,” said Vogelzang.