Tamkeen rebuilds online portal and launches new programs 15x faster

Challenge

The perfect storm: End-of-life meets cloud migration

When Najma Al-Wadi joined as CTO, Tamkeen offered a portal built in Microsoft Dynamics that customers used to apply for the support programs provided by the fund. The problem was that the old solution was reaching its end of life.

"Our team had made so many customizations on top of Dynamics to make the most out of it that, eventually, even Microsoft couldn’t recognize its CRM anymore,” she remembers. “This resulted in a complex architecture that was challenging to manage. There were limited tracking and documentation capabilities, and launching new programs took up to three months."

Around the same time, Bahrain’s government introduced a cloud-first policy requiring government entities to move all on-premises infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

Tamkeen saw this as an opportunity to take a step forward and find a platform as a service that would allow the company to 1) move to the cloud, 2) replace the old CRM, and 3) boost Tamkeen’s internal digitalization.

Solution

Evaluating all options

Tamkeen evaluated several development solutions, including Microsoft CRM, PowerApps, Zoho, and Mendix. But in the end, it chose OutSystems for several reasons:

• Out-of-the-box integration with AWS.
• Strong presence and partner community in the Middle East.
• Automatic platform updates that free the developers to focus on development only.
• Embedded security checks and CI/CD tools.
• Ability to integrate with pretty much any system.
• A robust community and component repository that would increase agility and accelerate Tamkeen’s go-to-market.

Introducing a new customer experience

After choosing OutSystems, Tamkeen set off to rebuild the old CRM with the support of KPMG.

The new solution completely disrupted the previous customer experience. Thanks to the flexible UX/UI of OutSystems, the new Tamkeen Portal has an enhanced look and feel. It’s not only aesthetically more pleasing but also easier to use.

“Before, when a client applied to a program, they had to go through multiple fields that didn’t apply to everyone. With OutSystems, we created different roles and added dynamic fields that show or hide depending on the user. It’s a massive UX improvement,” said Abdulla Aljowder, IT Executive Director.

The new portal also includes additional features, such as integrations with other government systems that automatically fill applications. It also validates information and shows the history and progress of requested submissions.

Results

Faster go-to-market and unblocked innovation

With OutSystems, Tamkeen can add new programs and services to the CRM up to 15 times faster. Abdulla explained: “Often, the government launches new programs to respond to specific needs, and we need to be reactive and make those available in the portal very quickly. The old solution could take us one to three months; today, we can do it in two days.”

And if it’s just a small change to an existing program, it can be done in 10 minutes. This is possible thanks to the portal’s new architecture and reusability capabilities of OutSystems.

Tamkeen’s new online portal is also helping the organization prevent fraud through automatic checks that match the information provided with the data available in other intergovernmental systems with which the solution integrates.

Tamkeen is also using OutSystems to pioneer projects involving open banking. “We're leveraging OutSystems’ extensive integration capabilities to build an app that integrates with open banking to validate our customers’ IBAN automatically,” shared Najma. Tamkeen is the first government entity in Bahrain to use open banking services.

As for the future, Tamkeen plans to continuously evolve the system to enhance customer experience. The organization is currently working on adding GenAI, OCR, and other robotics technologies.