The Housing Industry Association (HIA) is seeking proposals from organisations interested in providing products and/or services to replace HIA's current Contracts Online (COL) portal. COL is designed to enable the residential building professional to easily produce legally compliant electronic contracts and documents to support their business.
The contracts and documents available through COL have been developed and are updated with the support of HIA's legal staff. The professional expertise, the ease of use of the system, and the HIA brand behind the contracts, are highly valued by the market and, consequently, the COL business has developed substantially over recent years.
High level requirements include:
1. Improve stability and reduce downtime by removing dependences on back end systems and integration where possible.
2. Improved filter and search capabilities
3. Look and feel refresh, ensuring consistency with hia.com.au
4. Significant improvement to security model, data sharing and access.
5. Greater flexibility in purchasing contracts - bundling, discounts etc.

Expected outcomes include:
1. Replace the existing COL system with a robust, highly available system that is easy to update and allows for faster delivery of functional and content changes.
2. Eliminate the significant risks for HIA by:
Introducing a forms system which is easily updated and edited by applying non-specialist technical skills

Ensure that connections and other infrastructure are up to date, easy to maintain, and work with HIA's other systems
Providing an experience for the users that is reliable and offers the highest availability levels
3. Have the ability to include all of HIA online form capabilities into a single platform in the future.
4. Redesign the infrastructure and external system dependencies to provide a seamless experience for customers in the event that external systems and data are not available. If an external linked system or component is unavailable, the COL user is unaware and can continue to use the system as normal.
5. Adopt functions which incorporate digital signatures, archive and business ownership and access.