Management Information System (MIS)
Client: Confidential
Challenge
A global Nonprofit organization focused on healthcare and affordability of health products only in developing countries.One of its country chapter along with its implementation partners, focusing on delivering family planning and reproductive health results through non-state providers.
The organization would receive data through manual interventions using excel. All three-partner organization have their own organizational structure to capture the data and submit it. All three partners collect, collate, process, filter and report data in varied ways. Each partner oversees operations in specific districts of implementing country allocated to them and implements different aspects of the overall program.
Two of the partners provide ‘Health Service Delivery’ through trained women and Community Mobilization Officers (CMOs) on the field. These officers visit women door to door, spread awareness on family planning methods and reproductive health, and refer them to providers in the program’s network. Both partners collect data on paper-forms/registers, which is entered into a Master Excel sheet. For the donor, they both have an Excel-based MIS, and they send monthly and quarterly reports with data around the KPIs to chapter country in Excel files.
The third partner operations under 2 categories: ‘Healthy Service Delivery’ and ‘Sales’. Health Service Delivery is performed through Quality Assurance Officers (QAOs), that collect operational and quality data from Providers. QAOs collect data on a tablet-based application developed in-house at providers’ facilities.
The Sales operations are implemented through a national distributor. The ND deploys sales staff who take orders for sales that are channeled through third partner’s warehouses. The sales staff collect data through a mobile application. This mobile application feeds data into ND’s servers, that generate an automated report on Excel which is emailed to third partner daily and a summary report emailed monthly. The third partner uploads the month-end summary Excel file from ND into their MIS. They then extract data from their central MIS and create and send monthly and quarterly reports to country chapter in Excel files.
This is a complete mayhem. Receiving timely data and reporting it to the chapter leadership and then submitting it to the donor agency takes time and the accuracy is always compromised. The implementing partners are not able to submit the required reports and analysis that is key to the project deliverables. Keeping a huge data is another issue.
The country chapter wants to eliminate manual collection, synthesis, calculations for analysis and reporting to donor. The vision is that data from the three partners should be received/uploaded onto country chapter’s MIS automatically and will be analyzed and sorted to be viewed/interpreted on a dashboard, where data necessary for reporting to donor can be downloaded in the needed format.
Solution
Verge Systems through a rigorous competitive bidding process successfully won the award of contract. It took Procurement Agency (PA) eight months to scrutinize and finalize the most competent company from the pool of multiple international companies interested to do the assignment.
Project Execution
The activity included to envisage, design, develop, train and deploy an interactive dashboard. The Dashboard would include a complete end-to-end solution that would receive the data, have strong algorithm that would mine the data coming into millions of transactions. And present the data into graphical, tabular and infographic formats that would give a holistic, detailed and drilled down information of all the indicators and would generate signals for unforeseen circumstances.
Verge Systems deployed the diverse team of experienced and young software engineers, creative designers, database engineers, network administrators and project management specialists. The team was initially deployed to understand the current structure of the data flow and possibilities of the proposed solutions. The project team and the country chapter team travelled to a third country for four days to discuss the current structure and analysis of their complete requirements.
The closed-door meeting helped the project team and the client to be on the same page and have clear expectations of what to come next. A complete project plan was designed and agreed with each task with estimated timeline.
Our Approach
The project team at Verge Systems held a detailed post requirement gathering meeting before kicking off the project. The project team decided to use the Agile Method of software development due to the variety of project’s stakeholders including three partners.
The project team received all the data points from the client and reports that were being submitted by all three partners. The team did reverse engineering on the available reports to understand the flow of the data and validations required to develop the dashboard.
Project team realized that the approach needs to be used in this project should be agile due to the possibilities of its complex and multiple data points.
