clients / case studies / government agencies

City of Phoenix, E-Payment System Replacement

Goal

Replace the City's electronic payment process -- which originated from a proprietary environment that was no longer supported by the original software vendor. The City was looking for an experienced firm to assist in the design, migration, and implementation efforts.

Solution

A new, workable system in a format the City can maintain and extend.

Results

Introduction

In 2000, the City of Phoenix began a pilot project to allow citizens to perform electronic payment transactions via the Internet to pay for services, fines, fees and acquire products requiring payment. The process has become known as E-Payments. E-Payment centralized internet credit card payments and aided departments in providing electronic payments as a part of their business services.  Year 2005-2006 statistics stated it supported nearly 620,000 transactions, representing over $64M in revenue.

What did we do?

We updated and extended the application into a format that the City specified, so that they could maintain and extend it thereafter. The application had three primary parts:

  • Data collection and validation
  • Payment processing
  • Maintenance and Reporting
It also had interfaces to the City’s Cybersource credit card processing vendor, and to their SAP financial management system.

The project entailed migrating from proprietary Hahtsite/Java development software to an open-source J2EE environment upon the Spring framework using SunONE (J2EE) Application Server. It included the following functionality:
  • User security (Login, maintenance, and access control)
  • Service / Product catalog
  • Payment processing
    • External customer web payments
    • External calls from other applications
    • Internal integrated payment processing
  • Reporting
    • Summary and detail reports by credit card type
    • Summary and detail by product type
    • Transaction history (steps in the process completed)

What was the result?

A working system for multiple city departments that can be maintained and extended by the City's in-house developers .