The application, developed by a team from Artech, made Uruguay the first country in Latin America to have a successful system for individual traceability. The contract was awarded to Artech, ICA, and Sonda that joined in a consortium in which Artech was entrusted with the development of the Management System, the generation of the application and the development of the backend. ICA was in charge of promoting and managing the optical forms processing system and the geographical information system Finally, Sonda was in charge of providing and maintaining the facilities and the equipment.
The MGAP had several systems for the collection of information operating simultaneously and they considered it was necessary to redesign, integrate and coordinate the existing information subsystems into a single National Livestock Information System. The project was also driven by the increasing demands of the domestic and international markets concerning quality assurance of products and processes, and to address the need of the government to improve the regulation of the system. The specific objectives of the system included high accessibility, the capturing and processing of data from paper forms, the geographic reference of available data for a better management of information, and tools to enable the analysis of all the information collected. Additionally, it required a faithful picture of the existing and historical situation of the basic attributes, property, location, and sanitary conditions of the national livestock, while launching Uruguay into an Individual Traceability Pilot Plan.
The core component of SNIG is the Management System, developed mostly by Artech. This system includes all the applications contained in the portal and provides integration services to other systems (both internal and external). The Management System has been developed on GeneXus 8.0 using the .NET generator, currently with over 2600 GeneXus objects and 200 tables; and is supported by other tools, such as GXportal (for the management of the portal), GXplorer and GXquery (tools for the analysis of data),the optical processing system SIPO (in Spanish Sistema de Procesamiento Óptico), and GIS (Geographic Information System).
The Management System has, among others, four core components: a single registry of producers; the management of forms sent by producers; the Group Traceability subsystem that records livestock inventories and the movements and changes of ownership and group changes; and the Individual Traceability subsystem, which enables the registration of identified animals and all associated events.
The application was developed from scratch and Uruguay was the first country in Latin America to implement a successful individual traceability system. This has resulted in several delegations from different countries coming to Uruguay to see the system at work, with a view to using it as a reference for the development of similar applications, such as in the case of Chile or Mexico.