Celebrating 2 years of successful operation
Jun 29, 2016
Before agricultural or veterinary chemical products can be legally sold, supplied or used in Australia, the products must be evaluated and registered.
The regulatory framework for managing agricultural chemicals and veterinary medicines in Australia is referred to as the National Registration Scheme for Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals (NRS). Under the NRS framework, there is a federal agency that is assigned responsibilities for the regulation and control of agricultural and veterinary chemicals up to the point of retail sale.
In 2013 FifthOcean Technologies team has been engaged to participate in a process of switching the regulatory business process from paper base to full electronic engagement with all participants which include applicants (product holders, manufacturers and agents / consultants), case managers, product evaluators and external agencies.
Solution
Within 12 months since engagement, FifthOcean technologies team has delivered an online Product Registration and Management Portal, automating and streamlining the application processes, engaging all users in a collaborative online environment, while eliminating paper, errors and manual processing, reducing time and saving costs to both applicants and agency.
The Portal supports collaboration between product manufacturers, their agents, product evaluators and other stakeholders. Portal functionality includes:
Another important component of the portal is smart eLabels, where product labels are created, evaluated and managed jointly by product holders and agency evaluators with full versioning and auditing (who has changed, what has been changed and when) capability.
One important note about the implementation of all applications - they are built using TransForm Engine (smart eforms platform), so no custom software development was required apart from creation of integration channels.
Most of effort in delivering this Portal was in translation of business rules, data structures, paper application forms and their relationships into a series of related online application forms.
The design of those online applications was visually driven (i.e. using Visual Designer). Such approach has allowed FifthOcean Technologies to create application forms of significant complexity with essentially no limits in terms of size. Product application may require preparation and simultaneous submission of multiple online forms. For example a single product application may involve:
Result
The FifthOcean Technologies team has ensured that their specialized expertise has been fully utilized to bring significant savings to the agency as well as to reduce regulatory burden on the industry participants.
Portal is now in operation for 2 years, since its launch with over 50 various submissions per day not a single bit of information has been lost.