LANSA helps Civadis deliver state-of-the-art software to Belgium local governments

Editors note: Through mergers and acquisitions the company name evolved from WGH Informatique, to CIGER, to Adehis and now Civadis.

Civadis S.A., an IBM® business partner with operations in Belgium and Luxembourg, uses LANSA to maintain and enhance packages for the administration of civil affairs and welfare centers. Over one hundred town and city councils in Belgium use Civadis’s software which includes AGGLO/400 for civil administration and CPAS2000 for welfare centers.

We save on support costs since the code generated by LANSA is error free.

“One of our biggest challenges is complying with ever changing local legislation and laws. To meet these mandatory legal requirements we needed a more efficient development and maintenance environment than RPG”, says Pierre Walczak, founder and general manager of Civadis. “With LANSA we can implement the mandatory requirements in less time than RPG, so we have more time for ‘nice to have’ enhancements.”

“When we were evaluating LANSA we also needed a tool that was compatible with our existing RPG based applications. LANSA promised that our existing staff could use LANSA to maintain and enhance our existing RPG applications as well as implementing completely new functionality. The co-existence of LANSA and RPG applications was smooth and a great success.”

Mr. Didier Rozen, EDP Manager at the Molenbeek Saint Jean Welfare Center is clearly a satisfied Civadis customer. “The first thing you notice is the consistency of the user interface presented by the LANSA application. Civadis has certainly delivered a user friendly application.”

This ability to efficiently maintain and at the same time improve software clearly benefits Civadis’s customers. A good example is that a change in legislation made it mandatory for all welfare centers in Brussels to change their accounting method before the year 1998. Molenbeek, one of the 19 municipalities of Greater Brussels, was the first welfare center to close two financial years under these new accounting rules using a beta version of a new accounting module in CPAS2000.

LANSA automatically ensures consistency of the application’s screens and panels. A trump card in the eyes of our end users.

So far Molenbeek has only been an ‘end-user’ of the software, but Mr. Rozen is so impressed with the quality of the solution that Molenbeek has purchased LANSA to develop its own in-house applications during 1997. “LANSA automatically ensures consistency of the application’s screens and panels. A trump card in the eyes of our end users. LANSA also offers better data integrity. Field and file level business rules and data base navigation are defined in the LANSA Object Repository.”

Mr. Patrick Jenard, EDP Manager at the Saint-Gilles town government, is another satisfied Civadis customer. “The system is flexible and provides fast response times. We strongly believe that we have the best platform (the IBM i) and software house (Civadis) that delivers state-of-the-art software. That Civadis uses LANSA is a strong recommendation. So much so that I am considering getting my own staff trained in LANSA.”

Civadis has been using LANSA since 1991 and the benefits are apparent for the complete development life cycle. “LANSA means that we can better estimate and plan our projects,” explains Enrico Cerica, Head of Software Development. “On average, we are able to stick to our original schedules.”

“We also save on support costs since the code generated by LANSA is error free,” concludes Pierre.

Company and System Information

• Through mergers and acquisitions the company name evolved from WGH Informatique, to CIGER, to Adehis and now Civadis
• Civadis is an IBM® Business partner specializing in software for the Public Sector.
• For more information visit: www.civadis.be
• AGGLO/400 is an IBM i based software package for the administration of civil affairs. It has a comprehensive range of modules including registration of people, public works, local tax, police, social affairs, cemeteries, libraries, accounting and a personnel system for public servants.
• CPAS2000 is a separate client/server package for the administration of welfare centers. Modules include social welfare, health, housing, meals-on-wheels, child care, loans and accounting. This package was built using ACE, a rapid application development tool to generate Visual Basic applications using LANSA’s intelligent middleware.
• Some of Civadis’s customers also use IBM® ImagePlus/400 and Civadis’s Optical Disk Management/400(R), an image processing and a COLD solution, to integrate document storage and workflow with AGGLO/400 and CPAS2000.