The challenge

The Walkerton tragedy and the subsequent inquiry into drinking water standards led to a requirement for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) to strengthen the Ministry’s drinking water operator certification and training program. Specifically, the Ministry needed to strengthen the requirements for the certification/licensing and training of operators of both drinking water treatment and distribution systems, while maintaining existing standards for wastewater collection and treatment systems.

The previous system was based on an Access 2000 database and assessed qualifications for certificates, issued and upgraded certificates and licences, generated renewal notices, and provided financial tracking and reporting. A second database tracked operator examinations, including exam questions, scoring and results, which were then manually entered into the database.

The scope

The legacy databases needed to be replaced by an application that would facilitate the certification, licensing, and training of operators of both drinking water and wastewater systems. The new application also needed to support the automatic transfer of exam results, eliminating the need for the second database. To achieve this goal, MOE carried out the business and logical architecture plus the business use cases for the new application.

The solution

Qualicom was awarded the contract to develop the new application, which provided an opportunity to significantly improve the level of service to the users of the certification system by taking advantage of next-generation design and technologies. Qualicom was engaged to design, develop, test, implement and document the new WWOCS application, as well as to provide the subsequent maintenance and support of the system.

Project deliverables included technical architecture, application architecture, GUI and application code, data clean-up and migration, testing and bug fixes, application code and version control, and system documentation, including an online help system.

The result

Through the use of leading-edge web technologies, Qualicom has empowered MOE with a greatly improved WWOCS system, incorporating secure access to water and wastewater operator certification data for all required stakeholders.

Back to top