MONTREAL (Quebec), May 8, 2013

Alphinat Inc. (TSXV: NPA), is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Vicrea for the delivery of intelligent e-services for municipalities in the Netherlands in SaaS and on-premises modes.

Vicrea is incorporating Alphinat SmartGuide® into their Vicrea Neuron Suite giving municipal clients in the Netherlands the ability to quickly deploy intelligent online services. Citizens no longer need to fill in data already known to the government. Furthermore, these online services are accessible from smartphones and tablets, making service delivery by municipalities even more user-friendly. This new generation of e-services has been tested succesfully in recent months by the municipality of Nijmegen.

Traditional municipal portals and web sites only function properly in a normal web browser on a desktop computer. This is not in line with today’s citizen preferences of using smartphones and tablets when interacting with the municipality’s digital service bureau. Moreover, most solutions lack proper data exhange capabilities between the e-services and the data that already resides in back-end systems, forcing citizens to fill in repetitive data alreay known to the government.

By combining the central repository of Vicrea’s Neuron Suite and the intelligent end-user interaction capabilities offered by Alphinat’s SmartGuide, Vicrea allows municipalities to deliver e-services with personalized, real time data exchange and an enhanced citizen experience. With these intelligent e-services, municipalities greatly enhance the quality of their online service delivery and increase citizen satisfaction.

Direct response via digital service bureau
The e-services offered by Vicrea enhance the citizen experience by leveraging all of the data already stored by municipalities to automatically determine whether a citizen is entitled to a particular service such as a tax refund or a parking permit. These complex real-time validations delivered by the digital service bureau result in tremendous time savings for citizens and the community.

Successful pilot with Nijmegen
The city of Nijmegen is the first municipality to make use of this new generation of intelligent e-services. Since the e-services management tool requires no programming knowledge, city officials can independently add e-services and make adjustments to their digital service bureau. According to Bas van der Hoeven, Information Architect at the municipality of Nijmegen, it is an outdated practice to ask citizens who are moving to answer 41 questions in order to comply to GEMMA standards (commonly used Dutch protocol). “With the solution offered by Vicrea, citizens can arrange a move by answering only 3 multiple choice questions online. Today, everyone is accustomed to the convenience of services such as Internet banking and online shopping and people are put off by long questionnaires, especially when the information is already known to the municipality. As a result of this new service offered by Vicrea, municipalities no longer need to validate and process data manually.”

Gemma StUF EF standard
Vicrea is currently talking to a large number of Dutch municipalities on the implementation of intelligent e-services that are fully integrated with their existing systems and to ensure that the data collected is outputted in a manner that complies with the Gemma StUF EF standard.

“We are very pleased to partner with Vicrea and look forward to a long, successful relationship” said Philippe Lecoq, President and CEO of Alphinat. “This agreement underlines our commitment to providing our partners with the ability to rapidly build, test and maintain enterprise-grade applications that can be deployed across multiple devices and platforms. Vicrea’s vision for municipal e-services is innovative and resolves the main roadblocks to a successful deployment of an online service bureau”.

“Alphinat SmartGuide® makes it possible for Vicrea to provide our customers with a state of the art solution”, states Kees Radstaak, CEO of Vicrea Solutions. “It gives us the flexible tool we were looking for to show what great services a municipality can offer once their data is structured by Vicrea. With Alphinat SmartGuide® the Dutch municipalities will be able to take the next step in making processes more efficient and giving customer satisfaction a boost as well.”