Wheels, Inc. uses many systems, processes, and data to manage corporate vehicle fleets for some of the world’s best-known businesses. As a leader in the fleet management industry, Wheels constantly evolves their technology and tools to deliver the latest capabilities to their clients. The OutSystems low-code development platform proved to be the fast track they needed to integrate all the moving parts into their core client-facing portal, creating one seamless, end-to-end user experience.
Mobile app in 13 weeks
Greater Workflow Efficiency
2x faster development speed
“OutSystems gives us control over the user experience so clients can seamlessly navigate between applications built with different underlying technologies.”
Challenge - From healthcare to energy and many industries in between, Wheels helps companies focus on their core business by handling everything related to their company vehicles. Due to the breadth of their services and the number of vehicles they manage, off-the-shelf products don’t cut it; therefore, Wheels develops its own solutions, customized to the unique needs of their clients.
At the heart of their offering is FleetView™, a SaaS-based multi-tenant client portal. They needed a low-code platform to rapidly add new capabilities that seamlessly coexist with the existing solution.
The platform also needed to integrate with a wide range of applications and services, like Salesforce case enablement. “We were looking for integration with essentially no limits,” explained Tim O'Hara, Chief Information Officer at Wheels. “We have to weave in a lot of existing data services, databases, and external service providers with their REST APIs.”
After consulting a Forrester Wave report, conducting an extensive evaluation, and comparing competitors, O’Hara ultimately selected OutSystems. “OutSystems had a richer feature set and what I call a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card that nobody else had.” OutSystems also supported enterprise-grade security measures, which was mandatory.
Solution - Wheels worked with OutSystems consultants to jumpstart the company’s low-code development process, starting with a Vehicle Inventory Management (VIM) application. It orchestrates the decision matrix for moving hundreds of vehicles at a time during client upsizing, downsizing, or turnover events, a process that was previously managed with legacy applications, emails, and other manual processes. The VIM application added new capabilities to the FleetView portal, supporting greater workflow efficiency, guided decision-making, SLA tracking, and higher quality. The front-end application is fully integrated with Salesforce case management and third-party vendors to create a unified user experience.
Now fully ramped up, the Wheels development team delivered a FleetView Mobile app in record time. While the web portal is mobile responsive, the new app allows clients to access the most essential capabilities in an experience streamlined and optimized for mobile. With minimal customization to an OutSystems theme designed for user experience, developers were able to focus on integrating capabilities. The app features biometric login, push notifications, and local storage among other functionality. Having built other apps for iOS and Android, developers appreciated the one code base for both platforms in OutSystems.
Wheels also used OutSystems to deliver a Telematics Order Processing System that digitizes the manual process of ordering and tracking data-producing plug-in devices, a Factory Acknowledgement application to ensure client expectations are met when ordering and configuring new vehicles, and an Employee Operations app to keep track of employee and contractor hours and information.
Results - Wheels is now able to quickly and flexibly add new capabilities to its core system and integrate the end-to-end client experience, business operations, and supplier network. Clients now move seamlessly from application to application in the FleetView ecosystem.
The projects have earned the development group positive feedback within the organization. Business stakeholders responded very positively to the quick turnarounds during the VIM application development, with iterations being delivered before expected. FleetView Mobile achieved record-breaking speed-to-market. The team delivered a working mobile app within 6 weeks and a full-featured multilingual app including a completed beta cycle in just 13 weeks total.
The CEO has noticed the productivity boost. “The pressure to build applications faster will never die,” laughed O’Hara. “But he was genuinely pleased and impressed with the pace that we are able to achieve with OutSystems.”
