How SASI improved the lives of over 100,000 people in Northern Brazil
How SASI improved the lives of over 100,000 people in Northern Brazil
What is SASI?
While working with institutional security, especially focused on schools a dynamic app for alarm emission was created called S.A.S.I (Sistema de Alertas de Segurança Institucional) (English: Institution Security Alert System). Slowly, however, the Brazilian government’s design brief became more specific for each project and client. Thus the project scope slowly expanded into a variety of services.
At a certain point in time, SASI realized that what was actually being built was a no-code platform. Because of this they then adopted the slogan "Customizable Communication" and moved away from the terminology "Institution Security Alert System". However, the acronym SASI was kept as the name of the platform.
SASI used Cal as part of their infrastructure to create a customized scheduling system for government-provided services at Manaus, Amazonas - Brazil within their application. So far, SASI has scheduled more than 100,000 individuals for many services provided by the government.
Why Cal.com?
Read further on why SASI chose Cal.com:
“After more than a year of research and development, Cal was the only platform we could find that had enough freedom, flexibility, and compatibility with our client requirements. Most of the other options (including building our own scheduling service) were way expensive or time-consuming or just did not have the right resources to meet the needs of our software (APIs, Open Source, and Customization).
Before we met Cal.com, we actually spent a lot of time (more than a year) building our own solutions from scratch and faced many challenges that Cal had already solved. We realized very quickly that most of the other platforms just did not have an open code base and open API or just had way too limited service on this aspect which would never enable us to fulfill our mission. I think a great team would take at least two years of work to build a platform that does what Cal.com provides as a service.”
– Vinicius Lopes, Software Architect, SASI
How did it work?
SASI first started by creating a fork of Cal. This was done in order to develop small integrations and customizations based on a brief which was sent by the Client. The design process was also informed by experiments and feedback from the target audience (the citizen in this case). This enabled SASI to create an extremely personalized UX and adapt the scheduling routine by adding custom validations based on unique rules from the government.
By offering a good API and easy-to-understand codebase, Cal.com enabled SASI to advance even further on meeting our client needs and permitted us to focus on their business rules instead of dealing with scheduling bugs or lack of freedom when building the system.
The Results
SASI saw a massive improvement in the quality of the service they provide and in the velocity of response, within a few weeks they were even able to start a process of quick feedback with our customers when customizing the scheduling solution for citizens. Every cycle became faster as they became more familiar with Cal's API.
For the population of the city, the results were even more expressive. The ability to self-schedule and the reduced time to do it became a big differential. The people who sometimes had to wait in queues during the early morning (and sometimes under heavy rain) just had to go now at the scheduled time to take the service. SASI says:
“We still have a lot to continue to expand upon. We want to improve on our scheduling service but this was a great improvement already, and we believe that Cal is going to make it possible for us to bring better service.”
– Vinicius Lopes, Software Architect, SASI
Since the beginning of the project over 100,000 people have benefited from this technology and SASI claims they can still see how often people are looking for service as well as gaining trust and comfort with the platform.