THE ACQUISITION OF A NEW MIS FOR A MFI

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THE ACQUISITION OF A NEW MIS FOR A MFI

• Workshop B2
• Friday 18 May 2000 1545 1715

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THE NEEDS

• Who Expresses the Need?Technical Staff or
  Managersor Operational Staff?
• Recent or Chronic?
• How Urgent?

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THE SHORT RUN

• Not All Solutions have to be IT Solutions!
• More Training
• Change Procedures
• Create the report externally ?
• Separate Administration in Excel?
• Modify the existing application (once more)?

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OBJECTIVES

• Reduce Time for Administration
• Handle More Clients
• Faster Loan Disbursements
• Increase Reliability of Information
• Reduce Fraud
• Related to a New Product (credit card e.g.)
• Improve Customer Service

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Who are we? Strong and Weak Points

• Banking or NGO Background
• Centralized or Decentralized Admin
• (No) Computer Network Infrastructure Available
• Can (not) fall back on internal/external IT
  experience
• MFI is (not) ready for change

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What MIS do we need?
Available in English Locally Supported Integrated
Package

• Loan Tracking
• Ability to define loan products
• Suitable for individual lendingand group lending
  methodologies
• Loan Assessment
• Loan Disbursement
• Loan Repayments
• Write Off
• Re-scheduling
• Indicator Tracking
• Automatic calculation of incentives loan officers

• Accounting
• General Ledger
• Budgeting
• Loan Tracking as sub-ledger of GL

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What is Available?

• Off-the-shelf micro-finance programs in English,
  not locally supported
• Some locally developed software

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No Word or Wordperfect for MFIs

• MFIs have divergentinformation needs
• Differences in definitions
• Different methodologies
• Myriad ways of accountingpractices
• Centralised/de-centralised, front-office/back-offi
  ce, etc ..

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How do we get what we want?

• Shall we buy off-the-shelf?
• Customise?
• Create tailor-made software?

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(Dis-)Advantages
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Most Common Errors

• No testing of software
• Too little training
• Under-estimation of data-conversion
• No (regular) backups (or on
  diskettes)

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Software Life-Cycle

• Feasability Study
• Analysis
• Design
• Programming/acquisition
• Conversion and Testing
• Training and Implementation
• Revisions

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Feasability study

• Inventory of problems
• Which problems can be resolved by a new MIS?
  Maybe a new MIS is not the solution?
• New MIS technically feasible, economically within
  the budget and socially acceptable?
• Delimitation of the new system
• Time-frame
• Definition of purpose, requirements and
  restrictions of new system
• Alternatives
• Consequencies for the organisation (especially in
  terms of personnel)
• Project team a manager, power users and the
  developper

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Analysis

• Creation of a construction plan
• Definition of functional specifications (what
  should the system be able to do ?)
• Definition of input (raw data) and output
  (reports)
• Definition of menu items, backup procedures,
  multi-user issues, security items

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Design

• Technical details
• Which development tool, operating system,
  hardware ?
• Data-dictionary
• Screen listing
• Report listing

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Programming/acquisition

• Shouldnt be a black box activity
• Prototyping

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Conversion

• Old data should be converted to new program?
• How much of the old goes into the new?
• Do we need a conversion program?
• Quality of the old data? Should the installation
  of a new MIS become an auditing exercise?
• Incompatibility between the old and the new
  system. Two systems for a long time.

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Testing

• Testing is essential, necessary to build
  confidence
• Part of the testing is done by the developer,
  part by the client
• Sometimes equal to the development time
• Checking in rounds enter full data set, list all
  bugs, debug, install update, re-enter full set,
  list bugs, debug, install update etc.
• Also checks on  system crashes, if data can be
  corrected, user-friendliness, duplicate
  numbering, widows and orphans

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Training and Implementation

• Technical manual
• On-line help, users manual
• Configuration of the program
• Parallel run for a couple of months
• User support

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Revisions

• Because of
• Errors
• New information needs
• Changes in hardware
• Often 50 of the budget of a computer department
  in an organisation
• Every 3 years system review

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Costs of wrong decisions
About 50 of the errors found during the testing
phase are directly related to errors made during
the system analysis phase.
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• End of Slides