The Cape Town-based Sports Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA) has completed the implementation of a new management and administration system based on the Catalyst Business Systems Engine (BSE) from ViaData.
According to Brent Walsh, operations manager at SSISA, the reason it adopted the new system was that the original software developers, who had custom developed a system based on Microsoft's Visual Basic, were no longer in business. It was getting harder for SSISA to have bugs fixed, or to add functionality. ”No one could work on the old system because no one understood the code,” he explains.
He says the company chose ViaData's Catalyst BSE because it allows business analysts, rather than programmers, to take a core role in developing the software needed. “The Catalyst BSE allows very rapid application development where much of the processing and business logic is done in SQL and stored in a standard SQL database to ensure it is maintainable and extensible over the long-term.
“We were impressed with how ViaData took the time and effort to understand our business and requirements, rather than giving us the typical cut-and-paste proposal,” Walsh explains.
Craig Byren, ViaData's MD, says they took a copy of the existing SSISA database, applied the Catalyst BSE to it, and did some rapid development of a prototype. Within two days he was able to go back to SSISA and demonstrate core functionality from a working system, he points out.
security and data management, with data and business logic stored in SQL, allowing a competent developer to maintain or enhance the system, with no proprietary code lock-in,” claims Byren.
SISSA says rapid membership growth demanded a new administration and management system as the old one was getting increasingly creaky and impossible to maintain.
“It posed not only a business risk from unreliability and possible data loss, but was also affecting clients' perception of the institute because of system errors and inconsistencies.”
ViaData started development of the system on 1 April, with the final phase completed at the end of September. According to SISSA, the new system was run in parallel with the legacy system for training and additional testing during October, and went live on 2 November.
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