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‘The secret was ARTech’s group’.

COSSAC, a saving and credit cooperative, got ready to face the year 2000 in less than a year- with the development of a fully new system that was implemented on December 13th. Cossac, provides services and loans for a monthly fee ...

The social security saving and credit cooperative, Cossac, provides services and loans for a monthly fee to its clients. It carries out an average of 300 transactions a day, each averaging $U 2.500 (US$ 21).

Cossac is a fast-growing enterprise that has increased its members by 20 % in the last four years. Today, it has more than 40 thousand members, a big difference from the  8000 members of just four years ago.

The cooperative used a program that was developed in RPG.  However, the program  did not fulfill the requirements for Y2K.  Rather than fixing the outdated system,  management decided to develop a new system. ”We rely quite heavily on ARTech. We started to plan our directive in February of 1999.  By April, we started development. We really worked against the clock. We were able to implement the system on 13th December, 1999.”, the Systems Manager, Eng. Silvana Edmond, remembered.

“By the time it was done, we could see that the human element was more important than the technology. It is not to infer that technology is not important, but it was the human effort that brought  this system’s to life in time.”, the manager of the enterprise, Julio Talamas, outlined. Eugenio García –who directed the project-, Ignacio Estefanell and Nicolás Szerenyi of ARTech, Silvana Edmond, Karina Sposito and Valentina Grattarolla of Cossac worked together for this team effort.

Cossac’s operative works by salary deduction, with a maximum discount percentage. The member identifies himself by his identity card number.  Then, according to the discounts he has on his receipt, the credits already given by Cossac and other institutions, the credit amount and the quantity of fees are thereby determined. The calculations are automatically performed in the program developed in GeneXus.

Depending on the loan’s amount tasks’ flow starts working (GX Workflow), which passes the authorization responsibility on to the boss or the manager for which the information corresponds. When is the manager authorizes, the task returns to the computer screen of the person who is assisting the member.  “With the former program, we did not have room for growth or any other possibility that we may cross in the future. The new system allows for continued growth, as well as providing all the controls with the minimum errors.”, Talamas outlined. In order to run the accounting system; Bantotal’s knowledge base was integrated. “Previously, we used an accounting program where we had to enter the data manually. Today, everything is communicated, and the daily movement is accounted for. This way, the balances and the exercise shutdowns are easier for the accountants, apart from minimizing the error possibility.” Cossac’s manager added. 

“I’m on top of the pyramid and it is possible for me to access any piece of information, at anytime. The data is fundamental when is comes time to make strategic decisions, and you know, the larger the enterprise is, the larger the error possibilities become. Up to now, we managed with a 10% error margin, which is minimal considering it was  done without a system. Today, the data is exact. Everything used to be a ‘more or less’ thought process before now.”, he explained.

“We did not use to have a lot of data (the name, the last name, the address) to give the managing board the information needed to be able to work. Today, we are collecting the data and we plan to use GXplorer (Data Warehouse).  For now, we have to work on loading the data, which is a job that will take a while.” Edmond explained.

“The day the system was implemented, 700 numbers were given –which does not represent the queries performed to the system- and the system worked very well. We did not have to close the door or put the curtains down.  We just went on working.”, the systems manager remembered. 

“The secret was ARTech’s group.” Talamas stated. “I am very demanding, and I can say that the staff we worked with were excellent. I saw them literally exhausted; and you only do that because you love your work, not because you have to do a job.”, he emphasized.

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