Saudi Arabia Railways shows how to use low-code for all app dev needs

Challenge

Reaching a level crossing with traditional development

Saudi Arabia Railways (SAR) is undergoing a massive digital transformation to boost its leadership in the rail industry and support the ambitious goals of the Saudi Vision 2030—which includes positioning Saudi Arabia as a global logistics hub.

Munif Al Subaie, Head of the Support Applications Section, was tasked with digitalizing the company’s business operations. However, with a team responsible for maintaining 30+ systems, traditional development was holding back Munif’s efforts.

“We had two problems with traditional development,” explained Munif.

• “The lack of code documentation.
• The slow development speed.”

So, SAR looked into low-code and found OutSystems.

Solution

A turbocharged development team

The first thing Munif did after adopting OutSystems was to restructure the way his developers operate.

The Support Applications Section used to be divided into three groups, each responsible for handling different systems. After switching to low-code, Munif combined all developers into a single team.

“Thanks to OutSystems visual capabilities, code is automatically documented,” Munif explained. “This means that if a developer is out or busy with other projects, someone else can easily take over. It makes us much more efficient in managing our resources.”

Another factor that enabled this change was code reusability. After building the first app with OutSystems, Munif and the team also built a foundation of components, including databases and CSS files, that they can reuse across multiple applications instead of starting each project from scratch. “As we deliver new projects, we continue to expand our component library, progressively increasing our development speed from one project to the next.”

The first solution SAR delivered was a document management system that the business had requested a few months ago.

“It had a certain degree of complexity, so the business was expecting the app in 8 to 10 months,” described Munif. “We built it in two months. You can imagine their surprise.”

Since then, SAR has delivered multiple solutions, including a failure management system, a shipment tracking portal, a fire protection app, and a budget planning app.

Results

Conquering developers and the business with one platform

SAR’s new applications have been helping the company achieve operational excellence. The document management system alone has reached 2,000 users, saving SAR’s collaborators 10,000 hours annually.

However, it’s not just time that OutSystems is helping SAR save; it’s also reducing development costs due to the enhanced development efficiency.

The code documentation capability helps manage the small development team as it breaks silos and enables Munif to move resources between projects more effectively. And the ability to reuse code and components accelerates the development of new solutions exponentially.

“Considering the load that is already handled by the team, without OutSystems, we'd probably need to hire someone just to handle code documentation. Plus, OutSystems makes merging and debugging much smoother. Before, we faced so many issues when merging codes. That’s not a problem anymore,” said Munif.

OutSystems is also instrumental in helping SAR ensure business continuity. According to Munif, 99% of the OutSystems solutions are up and running. Whenever a system is down, the team can quickly fix it and, in the worst-case scenario, easily revert back to the latest version, getting everything back to normal within a few hours with no impact on the business.

The business department also approves of OutSystems. “Business users are not concerned with the details of the technology used to build the solutions they need, as long as it fits the budget and saves time. And that’s what they get with OutSystems,” Munif concluded.

In the next few years, SAR plans to move all its applications into OutSystems and use the platform for all its development needs.