Kings III Cut Scheduling Time by over 95% with OutSystems

Challenge

Fixing a fragmented scheduling process under growing demand

Since 1989, Kings III has been the leading provider of emergency communication solutions, engineering, and manufacturing of emergency phones, while offering fully integrated, one-stop-shop services that include installation, maintenance, and 24/7 monitoring for over 140,000 phones across the United States and Canada.

As Kings III’s customer base grew, so did its call volume and its scheduling challenges. Scheduling service appointments was a slow, manual process.
“It took a scheduler anywhere from 2 minutes and 30 seconds to, worst case, about 5 minutes or more to book an appointment when it should have taken a few seconds,” recalls Shawn Aslam, Software Development Manager at Kings III. “Oftentimes, we had to put the customer on a long hold.” This not only held the potential to hurt customer experience but also created operational strain.

To handle increased demand and uphold the company’s core commitment to its customers, Kings III projected it would need to hire more schedulers, increasing labor costs and training overhead. Compounding the issue, schedulers had to work across three separate systems—CRM Salesforce, financial application Sedona, and alarm monitoring solution Manitou—each requiring its own licenses and logins, resulting in inefficiency and increased software costs.

The company needed a way to simplify and accelerate scheduling, reduce manual errors, and improve both customer satisfaction and technician efficiency without incurring additional overhead costs.

Solution

Building a smarter, faster scheduler with OutSystems

Kings III had chosen OutSystems as its application development platform in 2018. Back then, the company’s single developer needed a solution to build enterprise-grade applications faster, choosing low-code to meet the business's increasing demands. The first projects included a Salesforce-integrated sales automation workflow that reduced a 20-minute task to 2 minutes and a work-order management tablet application for field technicians. The apps, built four times faster than with traditional code, showed a clear ROI, so Kings III moved on to build more, growing its business and IT team around OutSystems.

When it was time to develop a custom application to handle the scheduling workload, the team knew OutSystems was a perfect fit.

In just six months, a five-person team, including two developers from certified partner Moxie, leveraged OutSystems’ speed, flexibility, and integration capabilities to build Smart Scheduler. This robust application, which combines modules for scheduling, technician routing, inventory, payments, and shipping, is built with OutSystems.

Smart Scheduler features a color-coded scheduling interface (Green/Yellow/Red) that quickly highlights optimal appointment times based on technician availability, region, and route optimization, integrating with GPS and Google Maps. “We gamified the new system to add a motivational element to boost scheduler engagement without pressure or penalties,” says Shawn. “Smart Scheduler’s built-in rules engine automatically scores each appointment slot, ranking the best options first and encouraging technicians to self-book.”

Configurable controls enable managers, such as customer service and installation leads, to fine-tune regional parameters and technician settings without requiring any code changes.

Secure on-premise deployment, supported by OutSystems’ built-in security controls, helps ensure data integrity and compliance across all environments.

“OutSystems gives us the ability to deliver quality enterprise software efficiently with low overhead and a lean team, enabling other staff members to focus on additional business priorities,” says Shawn. “It also allowed us to consolidate multiple systems into a single interface that talks to all our tools. We only need to log in once to access and log our data in a centralized place, creating maximum efficiency."

Results

Delivering speed and world-class service while reducing cost

The Smart Scheduler has revolutionized how Kings III manages its service operations, delivering measurable efficiency gains and a smoother experience for both customers and technicians.

With scheduling time significantly reduced by 95%—from upwards of 5 minutes to about 20 seconds—and services consolidated into a single platform, customers now enjoy shorter hold times and faster appointment booking, resulting in smoother interactions with less opportunity for frustration to occur. The platform also reduces the number of technicians needed, securing a lower overhead.

Technicians benefit as well, thanks to rules-driven, traffic-aware routing that clusters jobs efficiently, minimizes unnecessary truck rolls (valued at $275 per trip), optimizes time in the field, and adds a bit of fun and engagement through gamification. The system also provides sustained flexibility: managers can adjust configurations without developer involvement, helping to ensure continuous customization across departments.

“With OutSystems, Kings III built an enterprise-grade Smart Scheduler in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional development by transforming a complex, multi-system workflow into a seamless process,” says Shawn. “The result is a smarter, faster, and more customer-centric operation that saves time, reduces costs, and empowers our schedulers and technicians to perform at their best.”

The team at Kings III trusts OutSystems to streamline their business logistics and build their critical platform features, from scheduling to shipping, directly in OutSystems. They also have confidence in OutSystems Mentor to complement their staffing strategy and bring them even closer to what matters to the business. “We can invest in a Business Analyst who defines what is needed and the OutSystems platform understands them to their maximum potential, laying out as much of the code MVP as it can, making the handover from Business to IT much more streamlined, transparent, and aligned," says Shawn.