New Hampshire Housing builds solutions striving for 100% user satisfaction

Challenge

Custom applications, quickly and sustainably

“We wanted to give our staff and business partners more efficient ways to work,” says Bruce Jukes, New Hampshire Housing’s Senior Director, Business Technology, when recounting what originally brought his team to OutSystems. “We wanted to replace manual activities driven by email and calls with modern web portals and automated processes.”

That transformation demanded a new approach to development. “Traditionally, we evaluate off-the-shelf solutions before deciding to build,” says Bruce. “But our industry does not have many software providers, so over the years we’ve written many applications in a legacy platform that we’ve used very successfully. But that process can be time consuming, and it’s created a codebase that takes considerable expertise to understand and support.”

Bruce and team were thinking about the future as well as the present when they turned to OutSystems. In the present, they wanted the most efficient way to create a partner portal. For the future, they wanted to make the development of custom applications faster and more sustainable.

“We were looking for a low-code, rapid application development environment with a visual approach to creating applications that can be easily understood by our staff, including new developers,” says Jukes.

They also wanted a cloud-based solution. “We wanted to concentrate on building applications, not installing, configuring, and maintaining the environment.”

Solution

Delivering valuable new capabilities to internal and external users

New Hampshire Housing evaluated OutSystems and another low-code product, requesting on-site demonstrations of each. “The difference maker was the OutSystems dev environment,” Bruce recalls. “The screen accelerators, the simplicity of automating tasks, and the ease of publishing and running an application. We also liked the robustness of the platform, its support for DevOps, and the built-in, automated security. We were very impressed.”

The first application NH Housing built with OutSystems was its Lender Portal, which allows partners to manage loan reservations conveniently. In nine months, a single developer created the portal along with supporting functions–such as log in, multi-factor authentication, and an invitation process for partners–that has since been reused for other applications. Some of these functions even came prebuilt from the OutSystems Forge repository. “The Forge has been super helpful,” Bruce says. “It’s great to be able add valuable components and not have to write them yourself.”

Following the success of the Lender Portal, Bruce and his team used OutSystems to develop similar portals for homeowners and applicants. More recently, they’ve built internal applications to digitize business processes. One helps manage payments and expense reimbursements. Another, built in only three months, helps track grant funding that supports the removal of lead from homes.

New Hampshire Housing has also used OutSystems to develop and deploy a web service that connects OutSystems to the organization’s legacy database. While the organization maintains some applications in the legacy system, it can use the web service to modify data directly whenever it chooses. All new internal application development, says Bruce, will be performed in OutSystems.

Results

Meeting all user demands. Faster than ever.

Over time, four developers at New Hampshire Housing have used the OutSystems low-code platform to build seven applications plus supporting functions and connections.

“These apps have made a huge impact on staff efficiency and our partners’ experience. They’ve been very well received,” Bruce says. “And we delivered them while achieving our main development goals: the process is much faster than traditional coding and we can more easily read and maintain our software afterward.”

“Now, it’s faster, easier, and cheaper than before to build applications that do exactly what we need,” says Bruce. “Off-the-shelf solutions usually fulfill a certain portion of user demands, and the unfulfilled portion becomes spreadsheets or manual processes,” says Bruce. “But with the applications we write in-house using OutSystems, our users are typically 100% satisfied.”

So what’s next for NH Housing? In addition to using OutSystems AI features to bring even more speed to development, Bruce and team want to explore the possibility of forming an ecosystem of housing-industry software solutions with peer organizations.

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