Project Purpose

The overriding purpose behind the development of the Background is to improve the visibility of food and non-food commodities as they move from the donor to the beneficiaries. This purpose is driven by the need to address a key risk to DRMFSS: donor unwillingness to continue in the face of inadequate reporting.

All major design and development decisions taken during the building of the tracking system must contribute to this aim, and the achievement of these aims will be central when evaluating the project.

Purpose of this page

This page describes the major features than must be present in order for the Background to be considered a success, and is intended to fulfil the following functions:

At the start of development, and as part of the requirements gathering process, to act as a repository for the success criteria to be targeted
Once development is underway, this document will indicate the desired outcome, to provide a constant guide to project completion, and against which progress can be measured. If the project’s desired outcome changes, as is natural, the ‘degree of completeness’ may increase or decrease, depending upon how the ‘goal posts’ have been moved.
Finally, once this project is complete, this document will act as the primary means, outside user feedback, by which completeness can be judged.

All activities within this project should ultimately be directed toward addressing one or more of the aims listed on this page.

A separate page deals with items that are Out of Scope.

Project-Level Success Criteria

This section describes the major measurable project-level deliverables for CATS.

Improved reporting of KPIs

Requirement

Source: November 2011 Launch Workshop, documented in: “Recommended Development Path.docx”

The accurate and timely reporting of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is the single most important aim of the CATS project, as the KPIs are the primary way DRMFSS reports to donors on the status of food distribution

Measurable Outcome

Reproduce existing /wiki/spaces/CTS/pages/2162707 reports compiled by DRMFSS and presented to WFP
At least one report showing each of the KPI specified
Dashboard and/or charts showing each of the KPI bound by region, date, round and allocation month/year

Improved Donor Reporting

Requirement

Source: Jan ’11 evaluation document “RMSReport 310111.pdf” by Hubert Matthews.

Lack of credible, timely reporting by DRMFSS to WFP, USAID and other donors is the raison d'être of the entire Food Management Improvement Project. The development of CATS is a direct result of the “RMSReport 310111.pdf” document, which recommended the development of a commodity tracking system. Although many of the building blocks of the donor reports here will be addressed in found in the section "Improved reporting of KPIs", this section deals with the specific formats being requested by the major donors.

Measurable Outcome

Sample reports were provided by Muna Bayou on 18-Apr-12, following the first Phase 1 demonstration of CATS. See Appendix B - Donor Reporting, page 24.

The inclusion of these (or equivalent) reports will require prior authorisation from DRMFSS

Improved Forward Visibility of Deliveries

Requirement

Source: Nov ’11 Launch Workshop, documented in: “Recommended Development Path.docx”

When a region requests an allocation from DRMFSS, they are required to also notify the target wereda/FDP. At the moment, even if the notification of an impending delivery reaches the target FDP in time, it often does not contain a useful delivery timeframe (ETA).

Improving the forward visibility of deliveries is a key factor in reducing fraud and loss – or at least, of improving the detection and recording of it
FDPs often only become aware of a delivery when it physically arrives, and cannot prepare storage space in advance
Advance warning allows the FDP officials to start the process of notifying beneficiaries earlier
If a scheduled delivery does not take place, the Wereda/FDP has no easy way of knowing this

In 2012 an SMS Delivery-Notification (SDN) Pilot study was carried out to investigate the feasibility of using SMS to accomplish this aim. It established that while there are no issues with technically transmitting the SMS, the main impediment to the aim of “Improved Forward Visibility of Deliveries”, however, is the creation and maintenance of an accurate contact list.

Measurable Outcome

Assuming a workable contact list has been assembled, the following metrics can be used to measure the achievement of this aim:

Percentage of FDP that have a phone number attached
Percentage of dispatches from a hub that trigger an SMS
Manual survey of those phone numbers to check whether the dispatch notification was received