Pay and reward consultancy Innecto has used OutSystems, a leading modern application platform, to develop and deliver a range of industry-leading digital services for its customers.

Established in 2002, Innecto is the UK's largest independent reward consultancy, supporting more than 100 companies, from high-growth SMEs to large multinationals, with creative and commercially focused talent and reward solutions - these include Arsenal Football Club, Boden, the London Stock Exchange, Sky, and the V&A.

In order to test the market, it developed a range of prototype digital services for clients, based on existing tools and methodologies, including those for job evaluation and pay benchmarking.

Having successfully rolled out these services to clients, Innecto looked at how it could digitise more of its tools and improve the features of existing services, in order to stay ahead of competitors and better help its clients.

However, the team realised that its current platform - a bespoke PHP solution - which had been built by an external team of developers, would need to be rebuilt in order for the digital services to fulfil their true potential and become part of a complete suite of digital offerings.

The initial services had been built as a pilot, rather than as part of a strategic move to digitise all customer-facing services. As a result, the technology used to develop the platform was not capable of supporting Innecto’s vision and future needs, without huge levels of investment in recoding. Having received quotes for the work and ongoing support, the team realised that it was in a ‘technical debt’ position.

As a result, having developed its digital services roadmap, and following Innecto’s acquisition by Personal Group in 2019, it embarked on rebuilding its digital services to create its ‘360 Degree Toolkit’ in-house. 

Using the OutSystems modern application platform for ISVs, it was able to create a much more sophisticated set of feature-rich products that could be evolved and improved over time, as clients’ requirements changed. 

These include ‘Evaluate’, Innecto’s online job evaluation system, ‘PayLab’, its pay benchmarking and insights tool, and ‘Advance’ product, an annual pay review modeller, which its clients use to manage their pay reviews on an annual cycle. It is also currently building ‘Flourish’, a performance and competency framework tool. Sitting on top of all of these is Innecto’s newly launched ‘Roles Profile Hub’, which is a dashboard that allows its clients to get insights across all of the systems they use and enables them to make better informed decisions.

Sarah Lardner, Director of Business Innovation and Senior Principal Consultant at Innecto, said: “Expanding the systems we had in place was going to be very expensive and wasn’t going to offer the flexibility and functionality we needed. As a result, we made the decision to wipe out our ‘technical debt’ and bring the development in-house, using OutSystems. This has allowed us to rollout this amazing system that has way more features than we previously thought possible and provides really valuable insights for our clients. As a result, we have improved customer retention rates, which is brilliant for the business.” 

Willem van Enter, VP of EMEA, at OutSystems, said: “Not only has our modern development platform enabled Innecto to digitise its services and deliver a range of feature-rich applications that help its clients make better, more informed decisions, it has also allowed it to clear its ‘technical debt’. The team can also quickly and easily make changes to the applications whenever they need to, as they’re no longer reliant on third-party developers that use traditional coding methods.”