INCM doubles its team—but develops 10x more

Challenge

The unbearable weight of tech sprawl and outdated architecture

Over the years, INCM has delivered hundreds of custom digital solutions to public and private companies using multiple technologies and architecture guidelines. However, as time passed, these technologies became outdated, making it increasingly difficult for INCM to update and maintain the solutions delivered.

Things got even more complicated as INCM’s business grew. “We were struggling to scale our resources as quickly as we were getting new business opportunities,” said Ricardo Vieira, IT Director.

At this point, the path forward became clear—INCM needed to migrate its applications to a technology that would reduce maintenance efforts and bridge the gap between business opportunities and resources. The new platform also had to offer a modern architecture that enabled INCM to evolve solutions as needed.

After evaluating the top low-code vendors, the company chose the OutSystems platform.

Solution

Delivering a critical government portal in half the time

One of the first solutions INCM migrated to OutSystems was Diário da República (DR)—the Portuguese government public portal for all official notices.

The online version of DR was built a decade ago in Liferay and it could no longer keep up with the government’s needs. “We reached a point where we’d only add functionality that was strictly necessary because it was a pain. It required a ton of workarounds, which made our technical debt skyrocket,” said Diogo Proença, Head of Portals.

Additionally, whenever traffic spiked—which happened every time the state budget or an important law was published—the portal experienced downtime.

INCM began by migrating the front end of DR to OutSystems, which took about a year. “DR is a critical portal for the government to communicate with citizens, so it had to be flawless,” explained Diogo. “We spent six months just doing loading tests and audits.” Even with long testing cycles, the new DR was built in half the time of its predecessor.

Thanks to modern architecture, INCM can now publish new functionality and fixes weekly and even daily instead of the three months it used to take. The team also has better control over its technical debt. “We only push to production once AI-powered code quality checks are green. It helps us ensure the quality of our apps,” shared Diogo.

The next step is to migrate the back end to ODC.

Results

INCM saves €38,000 annually while growing its business volume

DR is a massive portal with 12 million pages and counting. Every week, 2.6 million people visit the portal—a number that can reach 120K+ daily visitors on peak days. Since the migration, its performance hasn’t even flinched.

With OutSystems, INCM can not only launch new functionality faster but also handle more complex developments.

“There’s a suggestion box in the portal. There isn’t a single suggestion we couldn’t implement due to its complexity,” said Diogo. “It’s funny because the user feedback also changed. Before, it was almost aggressive, but now they start by recognizing the improvements in the portal and then share their ideas.”

In addition to DR, INCM has developed 20 other applications, including the Online Complaint Book, Tobacco Traceability Portal, the Assay Digital Certificate, and an AI Legal Analysis Agent. Built using Agent Workbench, it serves as a specialized legislative expert, significantly accelerating the analytical process for its legal team. The agent processes new acts to instantly identify critical legal relationships with other legislation—such as modifications, rectifications, revocations, and regulatory effects—and determines if it is the transposition of a European directive. It also extracts key legal dates including the date of entry into force and effective date. By delivering all this complex, structured legal data in a JSON format, the Agent provides INCM's analysts with an immediate, organized summary of an act’s full legal impact.

On average, INCM has delivered these solutions up to two times faster than traditional development, which results in significant cost savings. “We spend 1900 hours per year on development at a rate of €40/h per FTE. We’re saving €38,000 annually by doubling our development speed,” calculated Diogo.

These cost savings, and the increased development speed, have significantly contributed to helping INCM grow its business volume from €100 million to €120 million.

Ricardo concluded: “We do a lot of projects for the Portuguese government, and due to the short political cycles, many projects need to be developed in a very short time. OutSystems enables us to be agile and respond to these needs in a way that we couldn’t before.”