South Africa’s MIBCO Fights War on Paper with Web Application
The Labour Relations Act of South Africa 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.
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.
MIBCO’s Requirement
Historically, MIBCO processed and conciliated monthly industry payroll 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 needed 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, who had developed systems with Informix, 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.
The Solution
In order to develop and integrate the two systems and migrate the solution seamlessly, Four Js was approached to provide a solution.
“The contribution that an application makes to an enterprise’s bottom line depends on two critical factors,” says Craig Dawson, Regional Manager of Four Js 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.”
The Result
“The solution provided by Four Js enabled us to develop a system and share code, 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 we were 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 code,” states Mommsen.
MIBCO has in addition, purchased a human resources payroll system through EmSoft, which is also developed using Four Js technology.
