75%
$1M
$30K
Islandwide, Puerto Rico’s largest express delivery company, partnered with OutSystems to drive digital transformation and expand their operational footprint with AI agents. Over the years, the development team has built several solutions, including a core logistics system and customer-facing apps that support Islandwide’s end-to-end business. Recently, the team augmented these apps with AI agents that standardize complex local addresses and eliminate package routing errors. Within four months, the AI agents reduced missing package manifest data from 21% to 5–6%, unlocked potential new revenue streams, and solidified Islandwide’s standing as a digital-first technology leader.
Discover OutSystems
Founded in 1969, Islandwide has grown to become the largest express delivery company in Puerto Rico. That growth, however, exposed a few technological challenges.
Chief among them was the company’s logistics system, which lacked the flexibility to keep pace with the evolving market. So, when Jorge Ramirez joined Islandwide as CIO in 2018, his first priority was modernizing the legacy logistics solution to lay the foundation for what would come next.
“The legacy system was in pretty poor shape. Developed in-house, poorly documented, endlessly customized with patches to meet specific customer requirements, and running on an aging server, it was something of a monster,” Jorge described.
An off-the-shelf solution wasn’t an option, as it couldn’t support the unique local business practices (for example, the islanders’ preference for cash payment on delivery).
So, Jorge decided to build a custom solution in-house. This decision later gave his team the flexibility to expand into AI to address two long-standing operational hurdles:
"In the logistics business, you’re only as good as your last delivery. Having our logistics system on a robust, secure cloud platform, like OutSystems, gives me great peace of mind. Now we can scale the operation with much more confidence."
Jorge and his team chose OutSystems for Islandwide’s digital transformation for several reasons:
Jorge and team launched the new logistics web-based solution in 2020. This core system integrates with the company’s finance ERP and became the foundation for subsequent digital solutions.
To highlight: a warehouse management system with inventory tracking, a courier mobile app that guides the company’s 300+ drivers along their routes and enables them to confirm deliveries, a gamified “Points & Rewards” program also for drivers, and a consumer-facing app called “iWide” that enables customers to order express deliveries.
"OutSystems gives us the best of both worlds: the flexibility to build custom solutions rapidly combined with enterprise-grade stability, performance monitoring, security, and change management."
When it was time to expand Islandwide’s digital transformation into AI, Jorge immediately decided to do it with OutSystems. “Our core operational systems run on OutSystems, so expanding our AI footprint on the same platform was a natural choice,” said Jorge.
However, that was only part of the reason. The team uses standard AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude for research, generating logic ideas, or gathering public data, but they weren’t comfortable asking an LLM to generate code outright. Doing so would still require the team to build all the underlying infrastructure themselves, such as database schemas, dev/test/production environments, secure connections, and deployment pipelines, which could introduce security and stability risks along the way.
“OutSystems, on the other hand, provides structured development, testing, and production environments. We know that what we test is exactly what gets deployed, ensuring data integrity and operational reliability,” said Yaraliz Mercado, Supervisor of IT.
"Delivering agentic solutions for an enterprise requires a platform that handles governance, security, and stability in a single repository. OutSystems provides that complete enterprise framework."
Jorge selected non-standard local addresses and package routing errors as the primary use cases for the company’s first AI agents:
"With OutSystems, everything is connected in one place. Because all our software enterprise context — databases, core logic — resides inside OutSystems, we operate under a unified security architecture, giving us the confidence to release applications quickly without compromising customer data."
With OutSystems, Jorge and team can achieve Islandwide’s digital transformation goals. According to CEO Pedro Rosaly, “The most important thing is we’ve achieved digital maturity. We can now create any public-facing or internal application that we need, at high speed and high quality, without the expense and delay of bringing in outside consultants.”
The new solutions have significantly impacted the business. The drivers’ mobile app saves drivers roughly one hour per day, totaling at least 7,200 hours per month, and eliminates the printing of 300 route manifests daily. The gamified “Points & Rewards” program helped improve operational effectiveness by approximately 2.4 percentage points, from 89.77% in January to 92.16% September of the same year.
Finance estimates that improved efficiency and lower driver turnover generated approximately $100,000 in annual overtime savings and another $13,000 in avoided employee replacement costs—a combined operational benefit of approximately $113,000 annually. Meanwhile, “iWide”, the consumer-facing app, enables customers to order express delivery in seconds, and have a package collected in as little as 15 minutes. The app integrates with UPS, Shopify, and Uber, and processes approximately $1 million in sales volume.
"From a customer experience point of view, we’re doing everything that major carriers like UPS and FedEx are doing. Actually, we do more, because we can adapt our processes to meet the specific needs of individual customers."
More importantly, building a solid foundation in OutSystems enables Islandwide to keep pace with technological innovation and market demands. This adaptability shows in how easily they could add agentic AI capabilities to a core process.
The intelligent conveyor reduces manual routing decisions by helping staff identify the correct terminal for each package. For one customer whose annual volume is approximately 120,000 packages, the share of packages remaining without digital manifest data fell from 21% to 5–6% within four months of the AI agent’s deployment.
Recovering this information reduces manual handling, supports more reliable routing, and gives drivers easier access to the details needed to complete deliveries and contact recipients. These improvements help Islandwide deliver better service with their existing resources. For this customer alone, Islandwide projects approximately $30,000 in annual overtime savings, with the potential to multiply these savings as they roll out AI-powered label processing to additional customers.
AI-powered label processing also enables near-immediate customer onboarding, eliminating the wait for electronic shipment data or customer data integration. By extracting shipment details directly from package labels, Islandwide can begin serving new customers faster, with less technical effort required from both sides.
The address standardization agent, on the other hand, has opened a new revenue opportunity for the company. Since non-standardized addresses are an island-wide problem shared by all major carriers, including FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the US Postal Service, Islandwide is exploring the idea of commercializing their address geolocation service and selling it to other organizations in the future.
From a reputation standpoint, OutSystems has helped elevate Islandwide from a traditional local transportation company into a digitized, tech-forward logistics leader in Puerto Rico.
"Before adopting OutSystems, Islandwide was viewed purely as a traditional logistics provider. Today, we are recognized as a modern, digital-first technology company in Puerto Rico. That transformation has made us an attractive employer in the local market."
