The Louisiana Administrative Division’s Office of Technology Services saves hundreds of hours of development effort with Oracle APEX

	Co-authored by Heidi Cautrell  Louisiana Administrative Division Office of Technology Services (OTS)

Office of Technology Services uses APEX to provide users with an even faster and more efficient experience. Apps can be developed more quickly, and users spend seconds rather than minutes completing forms.

Business challenges

The Louisiana Administrative Division Office of Technology Services (OTS) is a state office that provides both full and partial IT support to many state agencies and has many groups under its umbrella, including Database Administration, Server Administration, and Application and Data Management.

Faced with an aging infrastructure and the reduction of its team of developers, they decided to partner with Oracle to improve the quality of their services.

They also faced other challenges such as performance, security, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. In addition, the solution that they used prior to Oracle APEX required a secondary login for users and was not a viable long-term option.

“The reports created by APEX are very user-friendly. Forms created with APEX also preserve data-integrity – saving time for our end users. And the fact that APEX manages the form backend streamlines the entire process for our technical staff.”

Heidi Cautrell,

Louisiana Administrative Division Office of Technology Services (OTS)

Why did OTS choose Oracle APEX?

After creating their initial reporting and forms in Oracle Forms & Reports 6i and later upgrading to 10g/12c, the Office of Technology Services team at the Louisiana Administrative Division was searching for a low-code application platform for reporting and form solution. Oracle APEX provided a foundation for the team to enhance their technology infrastructure and satisfy their operational needs, leading to cost savings, an enhanced development environment, and improved application stability.

Results

OTS used Oracle APEX to develop user-friendly interfaces for its state agency support applications. One application helps LDEQ’s (Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality) Office of Management and Finance create invoices and track payments for permit and fee applications. The other application helps LDEQ’s Office of Environmental Compliance inspectors choose which companies to inspect for regulation compliance with EPA (US Federal Environmental Protection Agency) and LEDQ.

These updated applications provide an improved user experience and streamline the processing of new requests.

These APEX applications allow the team to create and refine a page for a specific task when needed. With just two developers, 37 forms and 58 reports were modernized with Oracle APEX, which resulted in a better user experience that no longer need to create separate files for the front-end and back-end code or worry about operations functioning as expected. All of this has made it possible to complete projects faster with almost no debugging. 

Thanks to the removal of secondary logins and load times, OTS users can now access reports and forms more efficiently and report fewer support issues.