Times Media group is reporting on its website that the Malawi government has decided to cling to Epcor software that has been in use for the country’s Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS) as it prepares to about K4.7 billion (US$10m).
According to the reporting Officials within Finance Ministry are accusing Minister Goodall Gondwe of interfering with the process by favouring Epcor despite the glaring challenges associated with the system that led to massive theft of public resources.
According to a desk research that the Treasury conducted before government invited bids for a proper software which are called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
Top five ranked IFMIS ERP solutions in order of rank are SAP. Oracle Financials; Microsoft Dynamics; Infor; and Epicor.
Government called for bids through an advert placed on January 22, 2015 as it is hunting for another ERP before withdrawing it on Friday amid pressure due to a number of anomalies in the whole process.
Treasury Spokesperson Nations Msowoya has said the provision of Ifmis services is a very sophisticated process that only leading, proven and reputable providers of such services throughout the world are invited.
“Such providers are not many,” he insisted.
Msowoya said they did not want to exclude Soft Tech even when they ranked last because they are also a reputable institution. “The decision is to have only the leading world providers of integrated accounting solutions compete,” he said.
The Office of the Director of Public Procurement (ODPP) told The Sunday Times that they indeed gave a no objection to the Treasury to do ‘restrict tendering’.
“This is where they identified a few that can ably do the job. But this is an open process to all those that can provide the services among the mentioned three,” explained ODPP Director Dye Mawindo.
The Ministry has, through the Accountant General’s Department (AGD), invited sealed proposals for supply, customisation, installation, configuration, integration, testing of, deployment and commissioning the Enterprise Resource Planning to drive IFMIS using the three based ERPs.
The current advertisement is against findings conducted by the Treasury whose report was released in November 2014 and established that since Government has been operating Epicor based IFMIS since year 2005 its performance is very slow such that payments of goods and services are oftentimes delayed.
Government attempted to upgrade from Epicor version 7.2 to Epicor 7.3.5 in 2008 but this did not help as the current version cannot meet government requirements as reflected in the revised business processes in financial management.
“The main challenge with the current Epicor is its extremely slow performance which is mainly attributed to poor database design, old version of Epicor and inadequate skills to manage and use the system,” the findings say.
As a long term solution government resolved through the findings to implement a new IFMIS ERP platform based on defined government requirements.
“An analysis of the comparisons reveals that SAP & Oracle are the best ERP solutions. However, Oracle-based ERP is ideal for Malawi Government due to its high customer satisfaction rate, wide range of functionality, far much more flexibility, and short implementation period,” the findings stated.
“The flexibility makes it easier for customisation, and the government of Malawi would take this advantage to automate most of its processes,” it added.
On Oracle ERP, the findings established that customer base is steadily increasing in Africa and most European countries are using Oracle based ERPs for their IFMIS.
“Its minimal implementation period is also an important factor because government would need the solution in the shortest time period,”
“Therefore, it is recommended that government implements its IFMIS solution based on Oracle financials ERP,” the report findings as seen by The Sunday Times indicated.
“However, it should be pointed out that Oracle financials is costly and requires highly skilled operators and users,” says the report.
The estimated total project is around US$10,000,000.00. The implementation period would be four years. A project team and governance structures are already available.
The new system’s ‘expected go-live date’ will be on July 1, 2016 and the report has a detailed plan.
But Gondwe contradicted Msowoya in an interview on Friday that they withdrew the advert because they wanted to include more information.
“There were other things that are required; the advert did not include them and we withdrew it because we want to do it again,” he said.
Just reading how Malawi is going about this process makes me wonder if there are qualified government people who can really make decisions. All these solutions are too costly and requires continuous expensive support and upgrades.
From personal experience I know that both oracle financials and SAP solutions are not flexible enough to be customized easily with in-house expertise. Meaning Malawi will continue to depend on either Oracle or SAP consultants that bill at a rate of $300 to $400 an hour for the entire life of the Applications.
As a software consultant for fortune 500 companies I know Malawi can develop in-house solutions using cheaper Enterprise software that powers today’s businesses and maximizes IT investments. Such as Universe or Unidata.
Universe provides intuitive database design and high performance data access. It combines NoSQL data access, storage and management capabilities across Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms. UniVerse also features a native, record-oriented integrated development environment. UniVerse enables robust high availability while also securing data through encryption and authentication.
UniVerse allows access via a variety of APIs, protocols, frameworks and architectures. UniVerse provides flexible data storage choices for maximum interoperability. Scale from the smallest workgroup to thousands of concurrent users. Universe’s flexible technology allocates table space automatically and dynamically to optimize performance and minimize disk usage for maximum efficiency.
Malawi can do better by Looking at solutions that are within its limited budget.
