Hapi makes staff happier and more engaged at work through a suite of HR services and employee benefits. As shown in research from the University of Warwick, happier staff are 12 percent more productive[i]. So, Personal Group’s solution benefits the employee and their entire organisation. It provides employees with a single point of access to a range of different services and third-party solutions. Currently, Personal Group works with more than 2 million UK employees across 550 organisations providing a range of services to improve happiness and productivity in the workplace.
In the past, Personal Group had depended on third parties to provide a white label platform that it could resell. However, Personal Group wanted to have the power in its hands and was determined to build its own platform to provide a more agile solution to support its growing client base. Personal Group’s IT team typically worked in a Microsoft development environment and coded in C# ASP.Net or Delphi, but opted this time to upgrade its development environment using a modern low-code approach. Personal Group chose OutSystems because company leaders were impressed by its large and successful user base that displayed a wide variety of use cases including creating enhanced digital experiences.
“From the outset, we had a clear vision in mind and we wanted to work with a technology partner who could help us realise Hapi’s full potential,” Ashley Doody, CIO of Personal Group, said. “We wanted to accelerate the development of the platform while leveraging the skills and capabilities we had in-house and minimising the amount of additional technology recruits needed to get the platform to market quickly. We also needed to ensure the platform could service a high and growing number of customers and users. OutSystems and a low-code development environment was the perfect answer.”
Next on Personal Group’s agenda is to expand on its success with public sector organisations, especially within the NHS and local government, where the new platform has proven invaluable to HR departments.
Richard Tilbury, Director of Development at Personal Group, added, “With OutSystems we have a development platform that produces a solution that scales across multiple servers without the need to specifically code for this. Low-code, while initially scary for some developers, is a win for us. The tool is visual, the developer works with flowcharts, and this makes the usual troubleshooting of issues much quicker, as the developer is not having to read through pages of code. OutSystems allows us to turn around new developments quickly.”
In terms of future development plans, Personal Group is currently scoping a new mobile app. It plans to use the OutSystems platform to simultaneously develop a solution for iPhone, iPad and Android, targeting a launch for Q3 2017.
