Krugersdorp Town Council has developed a project management system to streamline its operations in its civil and engineering department. The system, which was supplied by ATS, was developed using DataEase NetPlus, a powerful rapid application development and deployment tool.
Leon Fourie, director of civil and electrical services, said the council has experienced a dramatic increase since 1997 in the number of projects it undertakes. They include township developments, sewerage projects, new roads, community centres and electrical installations.
"At first we were unsure how to approach the increased workload. We consulted four organisations, including ATS, and we identified a priority for a project management system including streamlined communications whereby all our stakeholders could access the status of a project at any time," said Fourie.
The new system allows the council`s politicians and councilors to prioritise projects and at the same time update themselves on the status of each project. Community involvement is also ensured as the public have access to project developments through their local libraries and the
Council`s Web site. The project was partly funded by the Development Bank of Southern Africa and also utilised the services of Kutele Projects, a black empowerment organisation.
Chris Breytenbach, technical director, ATS, said: "Our biggest constraint was that the budget had been cut by 56% but the output had to remain the same. Traditional application development packages did not allow us the freedom to build the system fast enough within the extreme budgetary constraints therefore we had to make use of a RAD tool for development.
"The DataEase scalable RAD line of development tools gave us the rapid application development capabilities we required without jeopardising quality or system functionality. At the same time we moved to client/server technology and managed to stay within the specified budget."
DataEase NetPlus is a true second-generation client/server technology, providing business model-driven, object-orientated and event-driven database development. It was designed to meet the exacting requirements of client/server architecture and it lets developers focus on business requirements by making everything as simple as possible. This is achieved by means of its central business model repositary and its SCALE structure.
Breytenbach added: "The core intelligence of DataEase NetPlus is in the database-independent respository. No changes are needed when you want to deploy to another RDBMS for development. DataEase NetPlus also eliminated the need to write complex SQL code to perform joins and lookups and to manage concurrent data that comes from multiple database engines on multiple platforms.
Leon Fourie, director of civil and electrical services at Krugersdorp Town Council is pictured with Riaan Grobler, the council`s systems administration manager. In the background is the State Coach used by former President Paul Kruger.
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