Green Communities Intranet Goes Live

Requirements

Green Communities Canada is a national association of non-profit organizations that deliver innovative, practical environmental solutions to Canadian households and communities.

A key program for GCC is the delivery of residential energy audits using the Energuide for Houses auditing system. Each energy audit is documented in a set of electronic files which must be transmitted from energy auditors to GCC for quality assurance and storage. 

Implementation by RKIL

RKIL developed a web based data base system that allows geographically dispersed Energy Advisors submit information using their own computers and a modern web browsers. The system uses code developed in Ruby on Rails, and a MYSQL data base to collect, verify and store information for the GCC head office to verify and process.

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EnerGuide and ENERGY STAR

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 standard 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 NRCan has only 2 staff dedicated to tracking compliance.

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 system has been expanded to include a product web site the allows importers to check on allowable products before importing, and a secure system of exchanging information with Revenue Canada on imports of 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.  

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

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