Interfood adopted OutSystems to transform their ERP system into a user-friendly, unified solution that brings different parts of the business together. With support from Team Resilience, the IT team built a collaboration portal now used by 3,000+ external partners and layered AI agents on that same foundation to automatically prioritize urgent shipments. Together, these solutions save Interfood roughly 7,500 hours a year in manual work, freeing teams to focus on innovation instead of operations. The team is now exploring OutSystems Agent Experience to further accelerate app development, with initial results showing days of app development compressed into 90 minutes.
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"OutSystems empowers us to build AI agents in a governed system, with guardrails in place and the ability to plug and play models to help us achieve our goals."
Interfood is a leading global dairy trading organization based in the Netherlands. The company connects dairy suppliers and buyers all over the globe, generating approximately $3.5 billion in annual revenue.
This global operation, however, requires navigating complex international regulations, fluid market demands, and tight schedules, that are particularly unforgiving for rigid systems. “Back in 2018, we implemented an ERP that helped us digitize our business,” explained Kenny Claessens, IT Solutions Manager. “But in recent years, we’ve learned that the system wasn’t flexible enough to cater to our business needs. In the world of trading, flexibility is key.”
Given the uniqueness of a dairy trading organization, no off-the-shelf products match Interfood’s needs. So the team decided to extend their existing ERP using OutSystems. “We decided to keep our ERP as our single source of truth, but improve the experience of our users and streamline our processes using OutSystems apps,” said Kenny.
The IT team chose OutSystems for its full-stack capabilities to build custom apps tailored to their business and run them in the cloud. This enabled them to reduce manual overhead, as OutSystems handles hosting and infrastructure management, and free developers to focus on delivering value.
The platform’s ability to adapt solutions to market needs later proved essential to further modernize the ERP, this time by bringing in AI agents to tackle another critical challenge: inconsistent shipment prioritization. Each export coordinator prioritized shipments using their own set of rules, and that needed to change. “A perfect use case for agentic AI,” added Kenny.
"We’d built custom apps before, but our IT team still had to manually maintain the underlying infrastructure. OutSystems takes that off our plate, so we can do much more and get a lot more value in a shorter amount of time."
With the support of Team Resilience, an official OutSystems partner, the first step was creating an app called “Interfood Connect” that replaced disparate emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls with a single place to share documents with customers and suppliers. But “Interfood Connect” has since grown into much more. “Today, ‘Interfood Connect' is our central collaboration portal and connects us with all our global counterparties, including suppliers, customers, warehouses, and transport companies,” described Kenny.
Other apps have followed, including a mobile solution that allows traders to easily enter contracts on the go and “Control Tower,” used by export coordinators to manage highly complex global shipment logistics, and later enhanced with AI agents to ensure the consistency across urgent shipments.
"The power of OutSystems really came to life when we started building AI agents."
The team initially estimated that a deterministic model for “Control Tower” would take 30 days to build. But when they learned what OutSystems could do for AI agents, they chose to build agents instead, which delivered a better result in a third of the time.
“We concluded we could build two agents using OutSystems in only ten days, a third of the development time. Looking back, the original solution would have been a lot more rigid compared to the flexibility we have with these AI agents,” Kenny added.
This development speed has to do with OutSystems being a unified platform. That means that all the data is loaded with the right context, enabling Kenny and team to skip the manual prep work that normally goes into feeding an AI model. “It really makes you skip all of those prerequisites, and you can move on to developing what actually adds value,” said Kenny.
It also means developers build within a governed environment with security guardrails and governance systems already in place, making the agents safe for Interfood’s enterprise-grade operations from day one.
Finally, with OutSystems, Kenny’s team can also quickly swap different models when needed, giving them the flexibility to change their agent systems for cost control and accuracy. “To give you an example, when we were developing these agents, we tried ChatGPT-4o mini, but it wasn’t delivering the results we expected. With OutSystems, we quickly swapped it with 5.2 to achieve our goals,” Kenny shared.
Interfood is now exploring OutSystems Agent Experience, the platform layer that enables external coding agents to work with OutSystems applications under strict governance. For the pilot project, Interfood’s development team partnered with Team Resilience once again for an in-person, week-long hackathon, held with a specific goal in mind: to build a complaints management process primarily with AI, with human intervention where needed.
Using OutSystems and Claude, connected through the platform’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Kenny and team delivered an initial version of a complaints handling app in a week and a half, 20-25% faster than if they had followed traditional development methods.
João Duque, OutSystems Solution Architect at Team Resilience, added: “Because OutSystems gives agents access to the enterprise software context, we were able to automate regression testing. Whenever AI developed a new feature or capability, a regression test ran automatically to make sure nothing broke. That gave us the confidence that we were using AI development in a controlled way.”
"I was impressed by how effectively OutSystems Agent Experience built the business logic. The result was comparable to work produced by an experienced developer."
In addition to the development speed achieved with OutSystems Agent Experience, the two AI agents built on OutSystems have delivered notable efficiency gains for export coordinators. As new shipment information comes in from the ERP, the agents automatically recalculate priority in real time and show users where to focus first. This automation eliminates inconsistent shipment prioritization while saving one FTE of manual workload annually, allowing coordinators to spend their time on value-adding activities and business innovation.
"‘Interfood Connect’ brings clarity, speed, and collaboration to our supply chain network by giving everyone a single trusted place to work, while AI helps our teams prioritize urgent shipments faster and more accurately."
As for “Interfood Connect,” it replaced the scattered emails, phone calls, and Excel spreadsheets that used to hold Interfood’s partner communication together, creating a single source of truth for the whole business. Customers, suppliers, transport companies, and warehouses now log into a single portal to access contracts, orders, and product values, book transport orders directly with shipping companies, and collaborate in real time on operational changes. The portal serves over 3,000 external users, plus 300+ internal users.
By centralizing all this information, “Interfood Connect” saves Interfood approximately 7,500 hours per year, the equivalent of about four full-time employees.
And the feedback has been great:
"The biggest compliment we received is our partners saying that they prefer our portal over their own system. We actually received questions of whether we would be willing to sell the ‘Interfood Connect’ because they were very interested in using it themselves."
What started as a way to modernize document sharing has become the flexible foundation Interfood now builds their future on.
"If I would need to describe the impact of OutSystems, I would say it's game-changing."
