MIBCO case study

The Labour Relations Act provides for the self regulation of industries through the medium of bargaining councils. The Motor Industry Bargaining Council (MIBCO) is a bargaining council as envisaged in the Act, whose mission is to create and maintain industrial peace and stability in the motor industry.

It consists of representatives from both employer and employee organisations and has equal representation from both groups, approximately 14 500 employers and 187 000 employees throughout South Africa.

Agreements negotiated by the council are, where necessary, extended by the State to cover the entire industry, once satisfied that the parties to the council are in the majority. It is for this reason that all employers and employees falling within the motor industry fall under MIBCO`s jurisdiction.

Historically, MIBCO processed and conciliated monthly industry contribution reconciliation statements through a paper system. This system of collecting monthly contributions was resource intensive. "Besides the heavy burden of posting, collecting and sorting thousands of paper responses," says Erika Mommsen, Information Systems Manager of MIBCO, "tracking employee details that changed on a monthly, if not weekly basis, became even more labour intensive."

"We realised that we need to develop an online system to enable an easier way to firstly keep track of constant changes in employee details, and secondly to consolidate monthly collections."

In addition, MIBCO, working off an Informix platform, needed a system that could integrate with the front end system managed by Motor-on-line, a company that MIBCO partnered with to market and manage the user registration system through an Oracle database.

In order to develop and integrate the two systems and migrate the solution seamlessly, Four J`s was approached for a development tool solution.

Four J`s provides tools for rapidly developing high performance, transaction oriented applications for small, medium and large companies worldwide.

"The contribution that an application makes to an enterprise`s bottom line depends on two critical factors," says Craig Dawson, Regional Manager of Four J`s for Southern Africa, "the speed with which it can be developed and adapted to meet business needs and the costs associated with its development and deployment."

Four J`s mission is to deliver a development environment that excels in its openness, flexibility and performance, as well as providing the quickest and most cost effective means of evolving internal business processes.

Whether a platform or database strategy changes, applications developed in Four J`s Business Development Language will support a business decision now, and in the future. The application is able to grow with an organisation, to take advantage of new business opportunities, without having to reinvest in new skills or tools.

"The solution offered by Four J`s, enabled us to develop a system and share codes, using existing skills, within existing database tables. We were able, with only one developer, to implement the project well within our time frame of 6 months and under budget. "More beneficial to us however, is that we can migrate and integrate code across platforms even if we change from Informix to something else, without huge capital outlay and without the need to regenerate coding," states Mommsen.

MIBCO has in addition, purchased a human resources payroll system through EmSoft, which was developed using Four J`s technology.