Requirements

EcoEnergy Retrofit was created by the Government of Canada to help homeowners get independent, expert advice about the energy efficiency of their homes. Developed by the Office of Energy Efficiency of Natural Resources Canada in cooperation with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the program aims to develop a pool of qualified energy experts to help Canadians improve the energy efficiency of their houses. By reducing the energy used in our homes, we support Canada's goal of reducing the production of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

The system was required by the Office of Energy Efficiency at NRCan needed to accept files on house evaluations done by independent evaluators, store the evaluations, and issue payment instructions for the evaluations.

Implementation by RKIL

RKIL has progressively built a system with NRCan that made use of existing infrastructure, and allowed evaluators to submit files for archiving and payment utilizing open standards software. The system accepts files submitted by email, performs preliminary verifications on the data, and provides an interface to internal systems including the Government Financial System.

The original system was a client/server system which uses Omnis 7 as the client on Macintosh and Wintel workstations with Oracle running on a Windows server. The system has been expanded to include an eMail bot which processes incoming emails, and secure connections to the internal accounting systems to issue payments.