Government Resources Management System

The Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB) (National Agency for School Assistance and Scholarships) is an organization of the Chilean Government Administration. It is responsible for managing government resources devoted to the care of Chilean children and teenagers who are in a situation of bio-psycho-social vulnerability so that they enter, stay and are successful in the Educational System.

After over 40 years managing meal, health and scholarship programs of the various educational levels, the JUNAEB seeks to lower school drop out rates and build a Chile that can guarantee at least 12 years of schooling to all the children and teenagers.

These programs include the School Meal Program which aims at delivering meals to the students of the different schools in the whole country. This public program involves managing an annual budget of U$S 2,000,000 translated into 1,600,000 daily meals at 8,500 schools by means of 32 private concessionaires that provide these services.

In order to manage and control the resources devoted to the delivery of the meals it was necessary to replace the existing application hardware and software whose maintenance and development costs were unnecessarily high when compared with new technology, explained Cristián Rodríguez, JUNAEB IT Manager.

An application was needed that included the management of: Bids, Quotations, Awards, Advance Payments, Adjustments, Payments and Variable Fines, and with this objective TECHnologies & Solutions Ltda. was asked to develop this application in six months, using the JUNAEB's previous experience in this area as a basis.

The main reasons for choosing this solution were "the development of a Project with cutting edge technology that integrates connectivity with the regions and concessionaires, Web applications and Query tools while facilitating the distribution of applications in an open source environment, in three tiers, using code generation tools", pointed JUNAEB's IT manager.

"TECHnologies, expert in GeneXus development, showed us the capacities of GeneXus and we saw that it was what we needed to solve the problem. There were no limits and our needs could be solved with this solution," he explained. "The most important thing is that we reversed technological obsolescence with comparatively lower costs and much shorter development times," highlighted Rodríguez.

The solution has a Web component that offers the features for the relation with the concessionaires who have online access to all their information via Internet. In addition, through JUNAEB's Internet network, the Win component of the solution, there is access to all the features included in the modules mentioned before.

It was developed with GeneXus for Linux platform, it uses PostgreSQL as a database and it includes GXquery. The application developed by TECHnologies & Solutions Ltda offers greater data integrity through a friendly system, with an optimum normalized database and with much shorter processing times: "a process that used to take eight hours, now takes 30 minutes," pointed JUNAEB's IT manager.

JUNAEB
http://www.junaeb.cl

TECHnologies & Solutions Ltda
http://www.technologies.cl/