ACM leads Industry 4.0 with agentic AI strategy while hitting 300% ROI

Challenge

ACM breaks free from traditional development

Operating across Asia and Europe, ACM provides manufacturing solutions to several critical industries, including semi-conductor, electrical, electronics, medical, scientific, e-Commerce logistics, and e-Mobility. Despite its broad market, ACM’s digital transformation was hitting a wall. With only 5-7 developers, projects were piling up as the team was shackled to traditional development, legacy applications, and fragmented manual processes.

Expanding the team wasn’t an option, as finding full-stack developers skilled in its in-house technology was nearly impossible.

“Rather than being constrained by rigid technology stacks, we needed a full-stack platform that supported broad digital transformation—allowing for automation and agile development with zero restrictions,” said Erik Looi, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at ACM.

Enters OutSystems AI development platform.

Solution

A bimodal strategy for innovation at full speed

With OutSystems, ACM implemented a “Bimodal IT” model, where the AI platform is the tool of choice for high-innovation projects.

The company has certified its dev team in OutSystems and is now promoting distributed development. This allows Production and R&D teams to build their own specialized solutions without burdening the core IT team.

The company has built all sorts of mission-critical applications across the entire organization that connect to ACM’s databases, machines, and industrial IoT (IIoT) sensors, including:

• Operations: an Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) dashboard, a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), a Floor Stock Management, and a Warehouse Management solution. These solutions are currently available in two factories and are used by managers and production supervisors for real-time monitoring and actions.
• Core Integration: a modern orchestration layer over ACM’s SAP S/4 HANA core system and Azure AD.
• Finance and HR: financial sharing centers and employee wellbeing apps.
• Document management: automated workflows with eSignatures.

But the crown jewel of its innovation is the agentic AI multi-agent system built using OutSystems Agent Workbench. This system automates complex supply chain reporting by extracting material specs and pricing from technical drawings to compile cost reports—a task that previously took hours of manual labor and can now be done in minutes. The new workflow enables faster, more informed decisions, turning raw data into a strategic advantage.

By choosing OutSystems over generic tools like Copilot Studio, ACM gained superior control over prompt engineering, memory, and guardrails.

Results

ACM achieves 300% ROI and a 6-month payback period

OutSystems has allowed ACM to slash development time by 3–7x and quintuple its annual project delivery. This efficiency resulted in a 300% ROI, with the platform paying for itself in just six months.

Beyond the metrics, the platform has been a game-changer for ACM’s journey towards Industry 4.0.

The AI multi-agent system has helped it eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, giving engineers more time to act as subject matter experts in the development of the right solutions.

Plus, for an OEM manufacturer servicing multiple industries, the ability to build custom, high-complexity applications rapidly is a critical competitive advantage: “We are able to come up with the time to value in a very short time which is key to keep our leadership position in the manufacturing industry,” added Erik.

Looking ahead, ACM is expanding its AI strategy to allow decision-makers to use natural language to converse with production data. “We are moving beyond silos to a world where our data speaks. By infusing agentic AI across our data fabric, we are empowering leaders to query corporate knowledge as easily as asking a colleague, ‘How is production today?’ That is the future of machine cognition,” concluded Erik.