The Department of Labour has awarded a R2 million contract to Molepe Business Consulting Services and iFactory, an Oracle/Java systems development specialist, to design and implement an Oracle-based Skills Development Grant Disbursement Information System.
The system will manage the distribution of funds associated with the skills development payroll levy. Although governed by the Department of Labour, the day-to-day management of this fund is undertaken by 25 Sector Educational Training Authorities (SETAs).
The Oracle system is designed to assist the SETAs with the process of awarding grants and ensuring that the requirements of the Skills Development Act are met. In addition, it will be used to streamline the tracking, processing and payment of grant applications and limit the administrative overhead at the SETAs. The fund currently stands at around R3 billion, and more than 10 000 grant applications have been processed. Grants to the value of more than R100 million are expected to be paid in the next 12 months.
"The Department of Labour recognised that many SETAs, particularly the smaller ones with limited funds, would need help managing the workload," says Francois Marais, product manager for Oracle Development Tools at Oracle SA.
"A major requirement for the Oracle system was flexibility because of changing labour and training legislation. In addition, it has to be able to be integrated with other Oracle databases within the Department of Labour as well as provide Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) facilities for direct payment of grants. "The Pastel financial system also had to be built into the solution to either assist the smaller SETAs that cannot afford to buy an accounting package or to ensure the SETAs, which use the Grant system, operate from a common financial base," he says.
According to Marais, a long-term plan exists to develop an integrated Skills Development System of which Grants will be just one component. The others will include Education Training Quality Assurance, Learnership (on-site apprenticeship and college-based education) and Workplace Skills Planning (WSP). The last component is currently being developed by iFactory.
While designed as an online system, it was decided that, to minimise communications costs, the WSP component of the system would be effected offline at the SETAs and downloaded over a closed intranet hosted initially on GovNet and subsequently by Internet service provider, The Internet Solution. iFactory developed the system, using JDeveloper and making extensive use of its XML enablement which, according to Tony Forbes, MD of iFactory, facilitates rapid systems development.
Reporting is based on Oracle6i Reports, which allows easy report generation using wizards with an option to publish using XML, HTML, PDF or text. Currently, the Department of Labour is generating reports in PDF format for ease of distribution and use.
The system went live on Oracle`s OAS Application Server initially, but was transferred to Oracle8i AS on introduction. "The complete system, apart from early online overload problems, has worked well over the last two years, and the migration to a new environment went smoothly," says Ephraim Adom, assistant manager, Skills Development Funding Directorate.
To meet performance requirements, which now include the processing of some three million levy records, the department decided to implement Oracle8 iAS and the Oracle8i database. Hardware was also upgraded to an eight-processor 4Gb RAM HP-based system.
"As for the future, we`ll obviously be looking to upgrade to Oracle 9iAS with Oracle Containers for Java, but currently, the priority is to develop the other components of the proposed Skills Development System, by which time the tools should be in place to make the migration as simple as the last one," says Forbes.
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