Belgian brewer Duvel Moortgat brews and distributes numerous beer brands globally from its 11 breweries. The company needs slick digital systems to support its distribution channels. Since 2018, the brewer has used OutSystems to lessen the load on its small IT department.
Just one full-time developer supports five sales order portals, a safety portal, a complaints portal, and two mobile apps. A fourfold development boost means the IT team now delivers new features in days or weeks rather than months or longer.
“OutSystems eliminates lots of development toil so developers can focus on delivering business value instead of repetitive coding. We now deliver enhancements in one to two weeks instead of one to two months. So, our business can respond much more dynamically to market requirements.”
Family-controlled Belgian brewer Duvel Moortgat has produced its flagship beer, Duvel, since 1871 and now brews and distributes eleven beer brands globally. Although renowned for its traditional craftsmanship, sales and distribution increasingly depend on modern digital experiences.
The company’s back-office systems include Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Salesforce CRM. In 2017, the company developed a sales order portal to support distributors and customers. That experience led the company to look for a modern application development approach, as Wesly Van Cleempoel, IT Manager at Duvel Moortgat, explains.
“In the past, we used traditional development and front-end frameworks like Angular. Development was slow, too costly, and we had a huge maintenance overhead to keep these web apps updated and secure. We looked at low-code to lessen this burden.”
At the same time, the company started its first mobile application development projects. “We encountered the same problem,” said Wesly. “It was a constantly moving target, with new devices, new operating system versions. We spent far too much of our development budget on maintenance and testing rather than enhancements.”
With more apps and portals in the backlog, Duvel Moortgat had to find a more efficient approach to custom application development. Wesly’s team investigated three low-code platforms. They quickly eliminated one as too lightweight. The brewer selected OutSystems as its favored low-code platform following a detailed evaluation.
“We felt OutSystems gave us the most flexibility and open standards,” says Wesly. “The alternative that we considered would have locked us into proprietary technology. Ultimately, we chose OutSystems not just based on our technical evaluation but the quality of its local delivery partner, Providit.”
Speed-up development and improve agility
Deliver customer-facing apps
No lock-in, open standards-based platformWorking side-by-side with a single developer from Providit, Duvel Moortgat’s small development team quickly mastered rapid visual development with OutSystems.
“Our developers like OutSystems as it takes away a lot of the repetitive toil,” says Wesly. “Instead of needing to code yet another log-in screen or permissions framework, they can quickly drag and drop reusable components and modules. And the built-in DevOps capabilities mean you can publish in an instant to demonstrate and test much more easily.”
Although its first portal wasn’t much faster for Duvel Moortgat to develop, Wesly says, “We learned a huge amount in the process, so every subsequent development was faster. But the important thing is the time saved beyond go-live. Enhancements are much faster to deliver, testing is less onerous, and security patching is automatic with updates via the OutSystems Cloud.”
A central aspect of the portal is a customized content management system. This makes it quick and easy for Duvel Moortgat to add new product and branding collateral to the portal. Crucially, the content management features also localize what is shown to customers in different markets, such as different product and packaging labels and contact details.
Since 2019, the brewer has delivered five sales portals, a safety portal, and a complaints portal. The safety portal and one of its sales order portals have accompanying mobile apps. As its OutSystems application portfolio has grown, the cost-effectiveness and speed of delivery have continually risen.
“OutSystems has made app development much more sustainable. Without OutSystems, our small development team would have no time to deliver new features. We’d just be chasing our tail with maintenance chores and need a bigger team just to do that."
An example of the team’s improved responsiveness was the delivery of predictive order suggestions into its distributor’s portal. “We delivered this new capability in just a few days,” says Wesly. “This involved integrating CRM and ERP data to build a unique solution. The distributor’s portal now offers predictive order suggestions for thousands of bars across Belgium, improving customer experience and driving more sales for Duvel Moortgat.”
Providit, established in 2015 and founded by Kurt Vandevelde and Tim Timperman, has a 100% focus on OutSystems. Tim and Kurt have been working with the OutSystems platform since 2010 and have by far...
Learn more about Providit NVOver the past couple of years, the brewer’s IT team has focused on developing a microservices architecture to support its portals and mobile apps. Wesly says, “OutSystems has been a tremendous help to establish a more reusable architecture. We’ve built out a complete structure for portals and mobile apps without having to get into too much technical detail. OutSystems did the heavy lifting for us and was exactly what we needed.”
The resulting architecture means more reuse of prebuilt modules and components to compose the different applications that Duvel Moortgat requires. So, development tasks that used to take one to two months now typically get completed in one to two weeks—a fourfold agility boost.
“We can deliver most enhancements in a couple of days if the business demands. A couple of weeks is more typical, but that’s mostly planning and scheduling rather than development."
Reusing prebuilt integrations and OutSystems Forge components also accelerates application development. For example, Duvel Moortgat’s developer was able to quickly integrate container load optimization features from Cubemaster to enhance the international distributor portal.
“International shipping is much more economical if we maximize container-fill,” explains Wesly. “By integrating Cubemaster, we provide a three-dimensional representation of the shipping container to help users optimize their container load. That’s good for our distributors—they spend more on our products and proportionately less on shipping.”
Duvel Moortgat’s portals support distribution across Europe and AsiaPac, and use is extending to the American market, where an additional developer will join the team.
Looking ahead, Wesly sees more scope for OutSystems for the brewer. “Our early focus was portals and a few simple apps,” says Wesly. “We’ve got a two-year roadmap of enhancements and new applications where we’ll incorporate ERP and CRM data to create novel solutions that improve efficiency and personalize the customer experience. We’re also collaborating more with marketing to ensure we exploit the portals more fully, to engage in new ways with distributors and customers.”
The team also plans to enhance its customized content management system to speed up visual design tasks and enhance the UX around product information and images.
Commenting on the difference that OutSystems has made to his role, Wesly says, “My role is less deeply technical and more solution oriented. We are much faster and more responsive to business requirements and able to support aspects like product launches and promotional campaigns. The business loves OutSystems—they don’t know what it is, but they appreciate how much more responsive we’ve become.”
