Company Profile
Local Government Information Systems (LOGIS) is a consortium of Minnesota local government units. The purpose of LOGIS is to provide effective, reliable and adaptable technology solutions to Minnesota public agencies through the sharing of ideas, risks, resources and costs in a cooperative partnership that evolves with agencies' needs.
Project Overview
Alto has been working with LOGIS for several years assisting with their yearly updates to the LOGIS Property Data System, their Management Information System (MIS) solution for Assessing Departments. Property Data System (PDS) is a computer system that provides automated management and administrative support for many of the tasks associated with Minnesota real property appraisal and assessment.
Business Challenge
• Insufficient in-house development staff to support an additional project
• The project deadline and budget wouldn’t allow for an inexperienced developer to learn on the job. A developer with proven knowledge of the technologies being used was needed.
• The project manager was stretched between multiple projects and would not be able to micromanage the project.
Alto’s Solution
Alto provided a full time developer to work on site at LOGIS and assist with the PDS update. Because Alto hires and trains only experienced staff there was minimal downtime related to bringing the developer up to speed on the current software.
Alto’s developer worked on several aspects of the project, including:
· Building a project management feature in the application from the specs provided by the customer. The feature allows users to record assessable projects and automatically calculate the assessment tax for each affected land parcel.
· Creating an owner import feature that would allow cities to import owner records and assign them to the correct parcel. It allowed for recording the previous owners for historical purposes. The data was imported from multiple spreadsheets and later from a database table. Usually, more than 200,000+ records were being imported into a remote database.
· Resolving bugs discovered in the last production release.
Resulting Benefits
LOGIS was able to ship a quality product on time without sacrificing their other projects, and without damaging in-house morale by over working their existing staff. Logis also saved money compared to the costs of hiring a full time employee to meet a surge in business needs.
Technologies Used
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