Agility Awards

Project Description: ENSMO was developed in order to facilitate and increase the use of the electronic channel for the management of merger notifications. In addition to the electronic submission of notifications, it allows other forms of interaction in the merger control procedure including the on-line review of documents (access to file), the ability to follow the workflow, the dispatch of automatic alerts at certain process phases and access to final decisions by the notifying parties.

Customer quote: “The ENSMO project has fulfilled all of its objectives, reinforcing the Portuguese Competition Authority’s efficiency in assessing merger cases and reducing the burden on interested companies who can now electronically submit a formal merger notification. Moreover, the project has represented a major step toward the objective of reducing physical workflow and allowing for greater transparency towards notifying parties, who now have easier access to any merger proceedings initiated via ENSMO. The OutSystems Agile Platform and methodology allowed a perfect alignment between the business needs and the IT team throughout development.” - António Gomes, Head of Merger Department and Francisco Marques, IT Unit Coordinator.

Project Description: PEPAL is an internship management system developed for various municipalities across Portugal. It consists of functionality to manage the full internship lifecycle, from registering available internship opportunities to final candidate selection. System highlights include an online submission of candidate applications, an automatic candidate classification and selection engine, email/SMS notification of applicant status and contract management.

Customer quote: “PEPAL serves several government entities including regional and central municipalities, local companies and the central Government. It further benefits recent graduates, by providing an online platform where then can apply to available internship opportunities and follow the selection process without physically having to visit public administration offices. The Agile methodology allowed the continuous monitoring of the ongoing development both by key users and the DGAL board. This allowed for the timely delivery of the developed systems, under the agreed budget and with great acceptance by the end users.” – Luis Fernandes, Director of IT at DGAL.

Project Description: The OBM project was designed to improve several of the company’s internal processes including, implementation of budgeting models for both staff and materials, as well as improving the commercial process that was dispersed and misaligned with strategic objectives. The Agile Platform allowed the reorganization of processes related to both opportunity and budget management, guaranteeing that process and information are aligned to corporate strategy.

Customer quote: “This project clearly led to an improvement of many of our internal procedures: The rethinking process gave us the opportunity to standardize the cost structure while maintaining a fair efficiency ratio on effort/value added to all projects. We couldn’t be more satisfied with the development approach on this solution: The focus on identifying the business needs and getting the most out of the Agile Platform to implement them efficiently was paramount and successfully achieved. What is most impressive is the ability to rapidly adapt the solution if any change is required, with a reduced amount of risk and effort involved. The approach followed was indeed one of the key aspects for the success of this project.” – Bruno Armada, Financial and Administrative Director at Palexpo.

Project Description: The new billing reports application supports users in Cyta’s call centers and stores. The driver for the application was to improve response time to common billing questions from customers. This was critical due to the poor performance and rigid, menu-based structure of the legacy systems. To deal with this situation Cyta decided to modernize the applications by re-platforming them on a better-performing Unix system and by creating new web interfaces in key areas to make the operator’s job easier and more efficient.

Customer quote: “The Agile Platform has delivered a working system in weeks that enables our front-line staff to provide a superior service to our customers. As soon as the users saw what could be achieved we had an immediate request from them to increase the project scope. Using the Agile approach it was easy to define a new sprint and deliver the additional priority functions that they were requesting." - said Costas Psillides, Manager of IT Applications at CYTA

Project Description: This application provides a new solution for the operational management of airport activity including the production of financial reporting for the airports managed by SATA. The application is fully integrated with internal systems and our real time flight information system, AIMS. In addition it is ready to integrate with the Portuguese civil aviation authorities (INAC), a major step in the alignment with national policies of interoperability between organizations.

Customer quote: ““With the new SGOK application we saw immediate improvements in the way users interacted with the application due to the simplified user interface and reduced steps needed to take an action. The agile approach to development used by our IT team provided the conditions for continuous stakeholder involvement and commitment to the choices made while the Agile Platform facilitated rapid development and deployment to support the project.” - by Ricardo Ferraz de Carvalho, Manager at Sata.

Project Description: The Bill_AS system is a traffic billing system that allows ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal SA to manage 9 airports across Portugal’s mainland and surrounding islands more efficiently. The system has been designed with key strategic and operational guidelines in mind, in order to better handle the increasing capacity of the airports and replace the old traffic billing system.

Customer quote: “The Bill_AS project was strategic for our company, and the Agile Platform provided us the flexibility to adapt to the constant changes in business needs. The Agile Platform and the Agile methodology allowed us to quickly incorporate the feedback we gathered from each user interaction in order to obtain a system that would meet the business requirements much faster, instead of waiting until the end of the project to evaluate the system, detect the problems and then fix them." - said Carlos Madeira, VP of Board of Directors.

Project Description: Unified Form" is a system of international scope which collects environmental information and promotes the analysis and reporting to the European Union, in line with their environmental guidelines. The system supports several users profiles to manage and analyze the information throughout the entire process, from data submission, through multiple analysis stages to final validation.

Customer quote: “This system transformed the life of our organization, ensuring benefits to all the stakeholders involved, especially for our industrial clients. Thanks to the Agile Platform and the Agile methodology, the users could see the system’s benefits and results with their own eyes before the end of the development process, and give timely feedback to improve it. The stakes were high, the expectations where even higher and the results where a true celebration of success!" - said Mário Grácio, Managing Director.

Project Description: This application automates the generation of tax payment invoices. The system addresses the calculation of tax values, creation of tax letters, automatically exports these documents into the existing document management solution making them available for bulk printing and report generation.

Customer quote: “This new application eliminated human error in our tax payment invoicing process and took a monthly manual task from more than three days down to 3 hours. In addition year end processing will also be greatly reduced providing precious time to do other work. The Agile Platform helped us collaborate with the business by collecting feedback online, directly from the running application. The result was an agile communication process between us and the operators. By using an agile methodology we were able to follow a collaborative process and deliver a solution that fits our needs resulting in our end customer telling us “that’s exactly what I want!”." - said David Alves, Head of Strategic Projects Department.

Project Description: This application provides an integrated vision over the company’s investment budget and gives increased visibility into the execution of the various projects by managing the investment activities of Estradas de Portugal including construction of highways and new roads, installing traffic lights, etc. The application automates the processes associated with defining which investment activities will be implemented throughout the year. It also categorizes these activities and enforces investments ceilings throughout the approval and processing of account receivables invoices.

Customer quote: “The implementation of this project enabled the adoption and promotion of good practices as well as solidifying our commitment to accuracy, productivity and improved traceability in the management of the EP investment plan. Using the Agile methodology coupled with the Agile Platform, we were more easily able to gather end users’ feedback and work it into the project with speed and easy deployment." - said Rui Ribeiro, IT Manager.

Project Description: This system allows Estradas de Portugal to automate the workflow associated with managing their supplier relationships. It supports their RFP, Contracting, Supplier Evaluation and Financial transaction processes. It integrates with Construlink (public contracts platform), Oracle e eBusiness Suite, edoc (document management) and other existing OutSystems applications./p>

Customer quote: “The ability to consistently and effectively deliver RFPs to our suppliers provides confidence to the market and is a significant step towards openness for the company. Our estimates show that this application will generate savings of 250,000 Euro per year and pay for itself in less than one year. The agile methodology and the Agile Platform were perfect wheels for the project and allowed us to deliver on time, on budget with a very satisfied user community." - said Rui Ribeiro, IT Manager.

Project Description: This application is a consumer centric decision engine that helps individuals and companies who engage in the business of originating residential mortgages. It is based on an innovative personal finance model that enables Consumers and Mortgage Originators to simply and quickly evaluate an unlimited number of mortgage products for the purpose of determining what mortgage product, and accompanying terms, provides a strategy that puts the Consumer in the safest possible financial position for the purpose of meeting their mortgage obligation in the future.

Customer quote: “GreenBar America, LLC is a start- up company. Market timing is everything, and OutSystems built and delivered a product that enables our company to position ourselves to help an industry in need. In the words of R. Buckminster Fuller: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." That’s exactly what OutSystems has done with their Agile Platform. Their development approach made it possible to deliver a product where others have failed." - said Bryon Swanson, CEO.

Project Description: The project delivered a new Internet Portal for managing radiology exams. The portal automates the overall workflow from exam scheduling to delivery of the final exam reports to the physician. This is the first portal in this area that automates the end to end process for scheduling an exam to delivering the final reports. The portal is fully integrated with the existing RIS (Radiology Information System), developed by IMI.

Customer quote: “This new portal allowed IMI to provide an innovative service and helps up promote an image of innovation and modernity while associating the IMI brand to internet technologies. OutSystems’ Agile Platform and agile approach allowed IMI to support a very dynamic team that is always suggesting new features to improve workflow performance and innovative services requiring us to change business and workflow rules regularly." - said Nelson José Duarte Baltazar Mendes, Project Manager.

Project Description: The Pombal Municipality developed and deployed WebDoc2.0, a custom-developed document management system. This new system has all the basic features of a document management system, as well as features, processes and integrations that were tailored to the organization’s user needs, workflows and external systems, namely: templates, archive, alerts, mailbox monitoring and reporting, among others.

Customer quote: “The adoption of Agile methodologies by the Portuguese Public Administration is an excellent choice for IT teams as it provides a substantial productivity improvement. When you add the OutSystems’ Agile Platform to the mix, thanks to its small learning curve, our internal IT teams become more autonomous and can maintain the externally-developed applications without the need for costly external help." - said Nuno Salvador, IT Director.

Project Description: This project provided PROALV with an interface to register, manage and validate common information spread across two systems: LLPLINK and a customer’s specific financial system (usually an ERP). The solution allows users to see all Payment Requests coming from the LLPLINK system and associate them to the accounting information stored in their financial system streamlining the payment, notification and reporting process.

Customer quote: “This new application allowed us to transform a very complex process spanning multiple systems into a set of simple and common tasks. The Agile Platform provided the speed to change we needed to make this a success." - said Jorge Messias, IT Manager.

Project Description: The SCORE system is part of the University of Aveiro’s Energy Efficiency Program aiming to improve energy consumption across the university’s campus buildings. The system allows the management of various energy functions including lighting, power automation, access and time control, telemetry and cost imputation, HVAC and micro-production of energy (hot water and electricity). SCORE aggregates information and allows its 15,000 users - students, teachers, employees - to efficiently view, manage and control energy consumption according to their various user permissions.

Customer quote: “The SCORE system took advantage of the agile methodology and the Agile Platform to deliver an application that had to integrate with over 1000 different devices that control energy consumption and access control for the university. The methodology and Agile Platform’s speed to change allowed us to rapidly update the application as new integrations became available. The resulting system allows us to calculate costs more easily and attributed them to the individual departments and units of the University and will result in an energy savings of 25 to 30%." - said Pedro Ferreira, Maintenance Manager.

Project Description: Lugus implements a platform to manage service requests from University users to all areas of the University’s Shared Service Center (CSC.UC). Key areas include, Procurement, Logistics, Finance, Projects / Applications Funding, Human Resources and Correspondence. The application automates workflow and streamlines the overall business process and is integrated with SAP ERP, Open LDAP for central authentication and KnowledgeTree for document repository.

Customer quote: “The Lugus application gives the Shared Service Center the automation needed to address the objectives of the new administration – transparency and compliance with key service level agreements. It is now possible for the University to measure service effectiveness and identify bottlenecks, working towards improving processes and the quality of service provided. Applying the Agile Platform’s BPM capabilities we enabled the fast execution of tasks that were previously paper-based with long and often delayed execution paths." - said Mário Bernandes, Engineer.

Project Description: The WorldDoc Health Coaching Management System is a web based coaching application that facilitates the administration and management of telephonic health coaching programs by the coach. The application is enriched by the integration of clinical data (medical claims, pharmacy claims and biometric data) that helps identify and manage at risk individuals. In addition, the coaching application is integrated with a dynamic user interface on the WorldDoc Member Portal so the coach and the participant are literally "on the same page".

Customer quote: “Using the Agile Methodology and Agile Platform to develop this project allowed the WorldDoc team to quickly create the core application based on a prototype as well as rapidly implement changes necessary, based on feedback after each sprint, to finalize development and take the application to market. The Agile Platform’s Embedded Change Technology (ECT) tool permitted us to organize and facilitate the feedback process through real time communication." - said Sajal Dam, VP of IT.