Case Study: Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CAST) achieves 3-month system redevelopment and faster, more reliable case management with LANSA (Visual LANSA)

Lansa Puts Information at the Fingertips of Cast Emergency Workers

The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CAST) is North America’s largest child welfare agency, serving about 9,000 families and 24,000 children with 700 staff and 600 volunteers. CAST needed instant, 24/7 access to both structured records and narrative case notes to spot repeat cases and trigger urgent alerts. New government standards dramatically increased forms and reporting requirements, and redeveloping the existing Visual Basic Windows interface to integrate with their AS/400 backend was estimated to take eight months.

CAST switched to Visual LANSA and completed the redevelopment in three months. The change preserved the AS/400 for high availability while delivering richer Windows text handling and tighter AS/400 integration; the result was faster, more stable, and easier-to-deploy applications, higher developer productivity, reusable components, and better user efficiency—screening teams can typically produce action plans within two hours—and CAST was the first of 52 societies to implement the new regulations.

CAST

Samuel Lee

Director Information Services