EnerGuide and ENERGYSTAR

Requirements

The Residential Programs Group of the Office of Energy Efficiency at NRCan is responsible for the enforcement of Section 5 of the Energy Efficiency Act. The Act is Canada's response to the need to reduce the amount of Green House Gases that are produced as the result of using energy inefficient devices.

The Act requires the manufacturers and importers of certain types of energy using products to meet standards for the energy efficiency of these products. The companies are required to register their products with NRCan with information which includes the energy efficiency of the product. In conjunction with Revenue Canada, NRCan then tracks the import of products, and ensures that they meet the standards. The programs most visible component is the EnerGuide label which denotes products that have met the energy efficiency guide lines.

In 1997 there were approximately 1,000,000 imports of products covered by Section 5, and by 2018 the system has grown by orders of magnitude.

Implementation by RKIL

RKIL has progressively built a system with NRCan that allows for the cataloging of products to be tracked by Section 5, and the compliance with the import of those products. The system allowed NRCan to enter product energy efficiency reports, as well as to record information from Customs invoices that included Section 5 products. 

The original system was a client/server system which uses Omnis 7 as the client on Macintosh and Wintel workstations with Oracle running on Windows NT as the server. The system has been expanded to include an Oracle web server, and an MQ connection to Revenue Canada that uses Entrust technology.  

RKIL has continued to work with NRCan to improve the system which has been extended to include a product web portal that allows importers to check on allowable products before importing, and a secure system of exchanging information with Revenue Canada on imports of products. 

The implementation of secure communications with Revenue Canada was awarded a gold medal at the 1998 Distinction Awards for technology in the Federal Government.

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Project Tracking and Costing System

Requirements

Bell Nexxia owns and operates a seamless, coast-to-coast IP-Broadband network that has over 100 points of presence in key locations throughout Canada and the United States.

Bell Nexxia had a requirement to provide project managers the ability to track and report on customer projects. The project managers are based all across Canada, and all have access to the corporate Intranet where a wide range of tools are available.

Implementation by RKIL

RKIL developed a web based application using Lotus Notes and Domino engine that allows project managers to track the status of their projects using a web browser interface. The application allows project managers to update their projects, while the finance and implementation areas can independently update their information on the project.

The system allows data to be exported for additional analysis, and provides special summarized views for management.

Emergency Tracking System for Environment Canada

Requirement

The National Environmental Emergency Center at Environment Canada needed a system to track and report on environmental emergencies. When an emergency took place in the field, officers of the Department would go on site to determine the nature of the problem, and to work with provincial and other agencies to coordinate actions. 

The paper based system that was in place presented two major short comings. First, it was difficult for the field officer to keep all the necessary people up to date with the state in the field. Second, it was no simple way for the anyone to determine if there had been a similar incident before, and what actions should be taken.

Implementation by RKIL

RKIL developed a system that allowed the field officers to create an incident report in the field, then through a single dial up connection to the Internet, replicate this information to the provincial office as well as the national office. The officer could update the incident report at any time, and by changing the rating of the incident bring it to the attention of senior staff across the country.

The technology allowed the officers to take the entire 800,000 records from the data base in the field with them on their laptop computers to be able to refer to previous incidents as well as to search for the effects of specific chemicals. 

The system developed by RKIL makes use of Lotus Notes. The system can dynamically switch between English and French at any time during the application.

The system uses a client/server architecture with Notes running on Macintosh and Windows clients, and using Lotus Notes on Windows NT with TCP/IP as the data base engine.