Central Consumer Right Protection System
In today's market swarming with numerous providers of varying services and products, accompanied by aggressive commercials, it becomes more and more difficult to assess the quality of the goods and the way they are being sold. When consumers feel offended, they do not know what to do, leaving the problem unsolved. Although consumers are the decision-makers in the consumer market, they do not have the power to change existing systems.
The laws exist, but many consumers are not even aware of the rights they have nor how to assert these rights. Therefore, it has become necessary to introduce a control mechanism that aims to advise consumers and solve their complaints.
Central Consumer Right Protection System (CCRPS) has been developed in Croatia as a part of the elective European Union admission programmes, with the goal of improving relationships and consumer-awareness in the field of consumer protection.
The system supports the simultaneous working of several thousand users, being user-platform independent and accessible via the Web. The system is also scalable and based on open standards for data exchange, and safe from external intrusions from unauthorised users.
Besides consumers themselves, users of CCRPS are the Ministry of Economy, Labour and Entrepreneurship of the Republic of Croatia, the State Inspectorate of the Republic of Croatia, consumer's associations and counsels. We expect other state institutions, such as the Ministry of Health, Justice etc. to move in the same direction.
The system consists of three main parts:
- a web site for consumer information
- an application for managing requests, search advice and legal interpretation
- a Web forum.
The web site has been developed as a Content Management System (CMS) for the administration and editing of content. Through CMS users can submit requests and monitor the problem-solving process. Since the original idea was to create a central place for gathering and solving consumer problems, we have also set up a web discussion forum for communication amongst all participants.
The system programming solution is based on ComDesk - a configurable Combis framework for modelling and managing business processes, monitoring document flow, generating reminders and notices, searching and cross-referencing of objects in the process. It also supports archiving, administration, user-identification, access control and available actions depending on the users role and authorisation. Since it is an intranet web application with a central database, all actions and changes are immediately evident to all process participants who have the necessary authorisation, thus achieving maximum information availability with minimum hardware and software investments - the end-user needs only a personal computer connected to intranet and Web browser.
The central application is based on the J2EE platform, which is an industrial standard for the development of robust, quality applications. The application part supports the submission of consumers inquiries and requests through the Web, their reception and processing by the competent body, and giving feedback to the consumer. All information is retained for further referencing and the creation of reports that may be used to analyse the situation in the field of Consumer protection law.
Content Management System, which is used for editing web site, also supports access control. It is divided into a presentation part for visitors, and an administration part for content administrators. The system supports all modern CMS functionalities: version management, grouping texts into categories, monitoring document lifecycle, WYSIWYG text editing, fast search and text indexing etc.
The Web discussion forum is also divided into presentation and administration parts. Communication with users is conducted through the presentation part, whilst forum-creation, access control and text editing is conducted through the administration part.
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