Acacium Group goes from rapid prototyping to cutting-edge generative AI solutions

Challenge

The need to keep up with the business—and do it faster

Acacium Group’s IT team was used to traditional development technologies that provided the flexibility to build tailored customer solutions. However, these often came with an expensive price tag. “We’d sunk a lot of time and money developing apps internally, but we struggled to see the return on investment,” Daniel Lynch, Head of Solution Design at Acacium Group, explained.

At this point, Acacium Group’s Automation team looked into low-code as a tool for quickly prototyping solutions and, thus, to act faster on business ideas. “The idea was to build an app quickly and hand it to the business—‘Is this what you want?’—instead of spending three months just gathering the functional and non-functional requirements,” said Daniel.

Used to the Microsoft stack, Acacium Group considered PowerApps first—but ended up taking a different route.

A matter of security

After evaluating PowerApps, Acacium Group realized that it would need additional (and expert) resources to manage the platform infrastructure and security—which would detract from the original purpose of accelerating the ROI. So, Acacium Group looked at other alternatives.

“What attracted us to OutSystems is that we pay the subscription costs, and all the infrastructure and security is handled for us,” Daniel compared. “We’re in an industry with high compliance standards. OutSystems built-in security mechanisms bring security to the development process. This gives us back 75% of the time we were using just on managing infrastructure and security tasks.”

Solution

From prototyping to generative AI

Acacium Group started its low-code journey by tackling smaller apps that solved high-profile problems in day-to-day office life. The list included an invoice approval app and a booking app for preventative healthcare courses that reached 4,000 users monthly.

The success of these solutions proved the success of the OutSystems platform. So, when Daniel’s team was tasked to assess generative AI’s potential to enhance productivity and customer experience, he chose OutSystems for the job.

Daniel didn’t just want to surf the gen AI wave; he wanted to build an app that solved a real business problem.

And a big problem was the process of helping healthcare organizations find the best people for a job. Acacium Group holds one of the largest CV databases in the sector, giving them access to an extensive pool of candidates. The recruitment team had to manually review these CVs that were often outdated. “The process was so cumbersome, and it had so many accuracy issues that users ended up using LinkedIn instead,” said Daniel.

So, his team built an intelligent staff matching app—in just four weeks. The app built in OutSystems uses Azure OpenAI capabilities to match candidates available in a MongoDB database with job descriptions.

Results

New gen AI solution saves thousands of hours and improves accuracy

In the first three months since its launch, the new staffing app was adopted by 90% of eligible users and saved Acacium Group 2,000+ hours by replacing the previous manual process.

See how OutSystems can help you build Gen AI solutions

The company has 30 new gen AI ideas in its backlog, 11 already in production using OutSystems.

In addition to gen AI, Acacium Group is taking on more challenging use cases. For example, the company is modernizing two NHS patient flow solutions that will be fully migrated to OutSystems in the following months, as well as a critical onboarding compliance platform.

From a development perspective, Acacium Group can now create innovative solutions that otherwise would be unfeasible. Daniel concluded: “For the AI project, for example, if we'd gone down a more traditional route, we'd still be working on the first use case, and it would probably have been considered a dead end by now. OutSystems allows us to achieve what’s impossible with traditional code.”

As for the IT team, they’re happy with the new development speed. According to Simon Cooke, Lead Developer: “We’re talking about a 10x faster deployment. It saves us days’ worth of bug fixing investigation. It means we can finally enjoy our evenings instead of stressing over Jira tickets all week.”