The context

Since 1919 the ILO brings together governments, employers and workers of 187 Member States to set labour standards, develop policies and devise programmes promoting decent work for all. In line with this mission, efforts have been made to support the development and implementation of electronic case management systems (ECMS) for labour inspectorates with the aim of gathering evidence about the degree of compliance of member States with labor laws. Several ECMS have been successfully developed and currently the ILO counts on a toolkit of best practices in this matter. However, there are significant global disparities in access by public institutions to modern and resilient technology, including access to ECMS for labour inspectorates. To respond to these disparities, the ILO wanted to develop a universal ECMS to be implemented in states lacking the resources to build a custom system. After putting in place a Strategic Compliance Portal (SCPortal) to create and monitor inspection plans for priority sectors in real time, the ILO was seeking to create a version of the SCPortal to be used for all labour inspection actions, grounded on the Transformative Technology for Decent Work (TT4DW) initiative. The ILO partnered with Relief Applications to create a minimal viable product (MVP) for a universal ECMS to be piloted initially in two member States (Cook Islands and Samoa), then introduced to the other countries targetted by the project. Relief Applications developed the common ECMS using the no-code tool Oort allowing to provide standardized procedures while leaving room for customization to fit country-specific processes and accounting for evolving needs. The tool covers the 9 modules of the ECMS, allowing the listing and monitoring of enterprises liable to inspections, the management of cases and including integrated visualization of key performance and target indicators. This initiative enables the digitalization of the work of the labour inspectorates and provides better recording of related data for member states with limited resources to develop their own tool.