Many embassies struggle with a huge and not easy to regulate stream of visitors who want to apply for a visa of the Netherlands. As a consequence, lines at embassies and consulates are long and both visitors and officials encounter stress. The applied solution had to regulate that stream of visitors and make the number of visitors predictable. Moreover, the system should deliver flexibility concerning a fluctuating availability of consular section staff varying from hour to hour. Per hour a limit of visitors has to be implied. Personal data of the visitor, required to make an appointment in advance, can differ from embassy to embassy. The system should be useful for all embassies.

Offered solution:

The solution contains a back end and a front end application. The latter gets integrated with the current embassy's website. Here can be by a clear user interface easily be found out for which moment how many places are still available (see screenshot). De user selects a time interval. After this appears a form which he has to fill out and where a few standard checks are performed. After submitting the information the user has to confirm his appointment by the received confirmation letter within a certain period. The back end application has been protected by an authorisation system which has several authorisation levels. Here the embassy has the following possibilities:

• To freely edit holidays and non-working hours;
• To change the durance of appointments and the number of appointments at the same time;
• To plan or change appointments, coming in by phone;
• To generate reports;
• To create or delete users;
• To create content for the front end application and to create e-mail templates;
• To create, change and delete fields of the front end appointment form.

The online appointment system has been used already for 3 years and still gets improved continuously. At this moment it is in use at more than 35 embassies and consulates, among which many Dutch ones. There have been developed the following additional modules:

• Complete integration with a Content Management System. In this way the system can be used as a complete professional website itself;
• A self-updating registration module for Dutch citizens abroad.

Thanks to the extreme flexibility the system is used not only by embassies and consulates. It is appliable in any situation where a facilitating online appointments is needed.

Skills used:

Business Analysis, Project Management, PHP, Linux, JavaScript

Term:

Business Analysis: 1 week
Development & Testing stage: 1 month
Support: ongoing