Grants Management System - Entrepreneur and Mentor Portal
The Problem
The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF) is a not-for-profit organization that provides start-up mentoring, financing, and business resources for young entrepreneurs across Canada. Their organization allows entrepreneurs to submit business plans and apply for loans. In addition, mentors can apply to assist new startups with specific business knowledge such as accounting, marketing, and sales.
The CYBF processes were mostly manual and paper-based with some technology (e.g. spreadsheets) to track progress of loans through the approval process and the mentoring program once loans were approved. Since people involved were spread out across Canada, no one had a consolidated view of the overall application pipeline and it was difficult to pull consistent data to support funding drives for the programs.
The Jonah Group, in a joint development effort with partner firm JIG Technologies, was asked to build an online web-based workflow application that everyone within CYBF used to track, approve, and report on the progress of applications. Both entrepreneurs and mentors submit their applications online and are notified as the loan status changes throughout the process. As part of the solution, a new mentor / entrepreneur orientation program called MENT2B was developed and integrated into the workflow system.
Our Responsibilities
- Project planning and timeline estimation
- Technical leadership of a team of 5 technical developers; direct management of a team of 2 technical developers
- Participation in business analysis of the current paper-based workflow and processes
- Development of the web UI design, creation of page mockups and wireframes, integration of existing CYBF branding
- Technical Architecture design for all tiers of the application
- Quality Assurance testing and support
- Data migration and import of current data into the system
The Solution
Jonah delivered a full-featured solution with the following features, components and technologies:
Features
- Entrepreneur sign-up, business plan submission and loan application forms
- Local office committee, regional director, and head office adjudication and approval workflows
- Mentor application submission and approval processes
- Mentor matching programs
- Development and integration of MENT2B mentor-entrepreneur orientation program
- Detailed head office reporting on workflow, approvals, loan application status, mentoring status, etc.
- Security access and control
- Dashboard and searches for workflow
- Email notification of approval decisions
Components
- Web-based interface and application forms
- Custom Portal application front-end
- Interactive multimedia MENT2B website
- Java-based mid-tier workflow portal
- Back-end relational database schema and data migration (ETL)
- Custom Reporting system
Technologies
- XHTML, Javascript, AJAX
- JSP pages
- Spring MVC
- Hibernate data persistence framework
- Java / J2EE
- Tomcat Application Server
- PostgreSQL Relational Database Server
Unique Challenges, Solved
- We completed the business analysis of many core organizational business processes and modeled the processes into a common workflow system for all participants of the organization. This allowed for a common process and consistency which improved communication and reduced the time for approving loan requests
- The development of a common database of all entrepreneurs, applications, and loan authorization decisions allows for a single common view of what is happening throughout the CYBF organization
- A web-based system allowed people across Canada to access the system from their office, home, or on the road
- Entrepreneurs received faster turnaround on decisions for loan approvals
- The web-based orientation program allowed for development of a custom agreement between the entrepreneurs and their mentor and facilitated a closer working relationship
- We imported current and historical data allowing for more accurate reporting and the ability to raise additional funds
- The online system allows CYBF to handle a larger volume of loan requests without additional staffing and thus increases the number of entrepreneur start-ups
- Questions? Ready to move your project forward? We'd be happy to discuss a solution for your needs. Contact Us to find out more.
