A full app rebuild in record time. No shortcuts.

01  — CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Acerta had its app. It did its job. But the market was moving fast: employees expecting intuitive digital experiences, competitors catching up, prospects holding new partners to a higher digital bar. The opportunity was clear: stitch the existing patchwork into something seamless. The challenge? Doing it in six months, across multiple customer packages, deep legacy integrations, and a complex social secretariat landscape.

"No way" recalls Charlotte Vantomme, Director Digital Customer Experience at Acerta. That was her colleagues' reaction when they heard about the ambitious deadline. "You really can't do that."

Two days before the deadline, the new app was already being downloaded.

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02 — MAKE IT SEAMLESS

Built for speed, built for all.

The features themselves aren't rocket science. Leave management, expense tracking, calendars, HR services: employees know what they need. The hard part is delivering all of it in a way that feels intuitive and fast, on top of a sprawling collection of systems, each with its own logic, its own configurations, its own complexity. The old app couldn't hide that. The new one had to.

The first decision was the front-end technology. The Ionic framework had run its course and was getting hard to maintain. A modern React Native foundation replaced it, built for speed, flexibility, and longevity.

On top of that, the teams introduced a Backend for Frontend layer that abstracted the different platforms and backends at Acerta, significantly reducing complexity. Caching and performance improvements further ensure every user gets the same clean and consistent experience, no matter what's running underneath.

Those solid foundations gave the team room to make every detail count. When Charlotte mentioned offhand that she wanted the first-time experience to feel like fireworks, the team took it literally. The onboarding screen sparkles. It's a small thing. But it's what makes the difference between an app that works and one that delights.

But form never came at the cost of function. The app is fully WCAG compliant, because accessibility isn't a nice-to-have, it's the baseline.

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03 — MOVE FAST

Set the date. Ship the app.

Knowing they wanted to improve the app, Acerta wanted it fast. An ambitious deadline was set: just two quarters. Charlotte was experienced enough to know that ambition needs a safety net. So she built in some leeway, moving the internal go-live forward by two months to leave room for alpha testing, early feedback, and getting stakeholders on board before the real launch.

In The Pocket knew the terrain. Mobile. Customer portals. HR. The team had been there before. And that experience mattered.

The rest was discipline. Keeping the roadmap focused: no scope creep, no distractions. Automated testing and quality metrics kept the bar high. Frequent deployments kept the momentum going.

AI played a supporting role across development and design, from generating mock data to moving from design to code. Not a magic wand, but a genuine accelerator.

The app went live on time. Within budget. Two days before the deadline, it was already being downloaded.

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04 — BETTER TOGETHER

Two companies, one blended team.

Process shows you the finish line. People get you there.

"I didn't want our teams to think of each other as vendor and client," says Charlotte. "I wanted them to feel at home with each other."

And it showed in how the collaboration was set up. In The Pocket didn't operate as an external party. They embedded inside Acerta's organisation, bringing some of that studio magic with them. Acerta's functional analysts and product manager completed the picture, joining the product team from their side. Business, design and technology, in the same room, making decisions together. 

There was a lot of proactivity, Charlotte remembers, and a real understanding of when to switch gears. When features were still too uncertain, the team set them aside for refinement, and focused on what was ready to build.

The teams never lost sight of the goal: foundations first, ship the MVP, iterate from there.

The chemistry was no coincidence. Summer vibes sessions, first releases done together at the In The Pocket studio, internal hype videos to bring Acerta's own people along. When the app finally went live, the internal reaction caught people off guard. Colleagues took notice, in the best possible way.

The partnership continues into 2026, with new features and ongoing releases, driven by real usage insights. "Our two companies have connected their DNA," says Charlotte. "A DNA that delivers results.".

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What started as a patchwork is now an app customers love. What seemed like an impossible deadline was met. And what could have been a vendor relationship became something worth building on.