Park Industries modernizes its app portfolio and saves $350,000 in dev

Challenge

Innovation, the roughest diamond to polish

Park Industries is a family-owned company with a small IT team but a huge inventory of custom applications. The list includes 80+ apps built 15 years ago spread across multiple enterprise systems. As a result, the company often dealt with duplicated and inaccurate data that prevented Park Industries from growing at the pace the market demanded.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Park Industries also relied heavily on paper-based processes. "To give an example, our field workers that assess the health of machines had to write everything on paper, take pictures with their phones, and then spend six hours uploading everything into a spreadsheet to send back to the office," said David Lloyd, Director of IT.

The company knew it had to modernize its operations, but it struggled to develop new software with its four-person development team.

"We struggle to attract skilled resources to support our growth," David explained. "Plus, the business depends a lot on IT for simple tasks, like creating reports, leaving us little time to build the software that matters."

Solution

From Agile to extreme Agile

David Lloyd initially considered refactoring the company's legacy apps with traditional development. Until he heard about low-code and OutSystems.

The first step was to train the development team on the platform. "One of my biggest concerns was taking a software developer with 25 years of experience into low-code," David reminisced. "We went through the training with a real business problem and created a solution in less than one month. That built trust in OutSystems from veteran developers to summer interns."

With the support of OutSystems partner Capmation, Park Industries consolidated 65+ legacy systems into 26 OutSystems apps with expanded capabilities. "On average, one OutSystems app replaces four legacy apps, and we're able to build it 10x faster than traditional development," said David. "We were used to Agile development before, but this is extreme Agile."

According to David, "extreme Agile" isn't just about developing apps faster; it's about building them better. "We can bring product managers and business users together in a room to develop solutions collaboratively and with shared ownership. That drives user satisfaction."

Explore a few apps Park Industries has delivered:

Results

$350,000+ Saved in app development annually

With OutSystems, Park Industries consolidated its previously dispersed app ecosystem, resulting in improved process efficiency and, consequently, better customer experience.

"Our field service app replaced a manual process that took six hours with a solution that does everything in a matter of minutes," David described. "It also allows us to send invoices in a few hours when it used to take eight days to two weeks. Our workers are happier, and so are our customers."

But there's more happiness at Park Industries. Developers are more motivated with their new-found development speed as they can focus on software that matters instead of spending their time keeping the lights on. In fact, according to David, he reduced maintenance allocations from 50%+ to less than 10%.

From a business perspective, speed also means lower costs. Park Industries is saving over $350,000 in app development thanks to the efficiency of low-code. David highlights reusability, built-in security features, and automated code generation that ensures standardization of apps as the main reasons for these savings. "Going back to the field service app example, it took us 74% less investment than our estimations with traditional development."

OutSystems has also improved the relationship between business and IT. "We notice that users are coming back to IT with more ideas and thinking more creatively on how to solve problems. That's the biggest benefit of this extreme Agile culture: app dev becomes a true joint effort between business and IT."