The journey of web application COCI
Published on: Author: Guillermo Resodimedjo Category: NewsSint Maarten’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (COCI, pronounced ‘cozy’) is located at the heart of its capital city. In 2015, the COCI team launched a tender with the aim of automating its business process. Qualogy worked with the COCI IT staff to create COCI ONLINE.
The island country of Sint Maarten in the Caribbean welcomes approximately 4.5 million tourists every year. The island boasts pristine beaches and stunning seascapes, and is also becoming increasingly attractive to investors. The challenges for COCI started when the number of businesses began to rise. Companies were being registered manually, which made for sluggish processing and a higher margin for human error.
In 2014, the COCI Board of Directors aimed to improve business on Sint Maarten. In this context, COCI re-examined its own position and formulated projects that would improve its products and services and facilitate better business. COCI felt that the business community, dependent on a secure business environment for its further development, needed higher quality, better access to COCI and faster response times.
COCI online registration module
Better business also requires notaries to improve their processes, such as incorporating and registering businesses and processing amendments. The COCI Board of Directors therefore asked management to design, develop and implement a COCI online registration module. COCI management commenced a bidding process in the second quarter of 2015 to acquire an interface module for COCI.
Qualogy partners with COCI
The tender was eventually won by Qualogy Caribbean. Qualogy reacted quickly by putting a team together that consisted of business consultants, software developers and software testers. Going beyond contract deliverables, Qualogy partnered with COCI to design and develop the desired online solution.
First, the COCI team flew to our Suriname office to start analyzing the situation. COCI wanted a front office web application that would allow business owners to register an organization or make amendments anytime and anywhere. To process these digital requests they also asked for a back office web application to be used by staff members.
From Paramaribo to Sint Maarten
After six months of hard work and dedication, the application was finally ready to be launched. Our team flew from Paramaribo to Sint Maarten to install the applications and to make sure that everything ran smoothly during the launch of the front office web application. Before the launch, all COCI staff members were trained on how to use both the front and back office applications. The response was great and Qualogy received many compliments. In the end, all the stress and hard work that went into building this application paid off. Based on their response, it was clear that the staff members also enjoyed the training.
Launch: front office web application
The day of the launch was very important for COCI and for Qualogy. The pressure started mounting when various officials, including notaries, parliamentarians, lawyers and board members, were invited to attend. Qualogy demonstrated the front office web application and the audience was clearly impressed. In addition to many compliments, there was also plenty of constructive feedback on things that needed improving.
The next day, the Qualogy team boarded a plane back to Suriname. This launch marked the first phase of the project; a payment module and a viewing module will be launched within the next six to eight weeks. This launch method was chosen in order to safeguard the integrity of the COCI system and to create a secure environment for setting up businesses more quickly on Sint Maarten.
