Ministry of Education (Moe)

Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ministry of Education (MoE) EMIS Directorate

Terms of Reference (ToR)

Enhancement of ISD-MIS System

1. Background The Infrastructure Service Department (ISD)of the Ministry of Education is seeking for qualified vendors classified as Technical Specialists or Solution Providers that can enhance ISD-MIS system. This document provides the deliverables required in the response to the call for tender; responses to this request will be evaluated based on the quantitative and qualitative scoring of the proposal. Responses will also be evaluated for technical, functional, and procedural methods. Respondents should evaluate this request and identify all costs associated with including, software maintenance, third party software, third party software maintenance, implementation, conversion, documentation and training. The bidder is requested to provide an estimate of all costs associated with the project. All responses are at the bidder’s cost.

ISD will evaluate the responses to determine which bidder’s solution meets the organization's requirements. All proposals must provide complete end-to-end solutions, seamless integration and a description of the maintenance. The end solution will be a copyright of ISD and all source code will be the property of the Ministry of Education. No third-party branding is allowed.

1.1 Suppliers

1.1.1 Infrastructure Service Department (ISD) ISD is one of the technical departments of MoE mandated to manage education infrastructure projects including planning, surveys, technical design and estimation of construction projects, monitoring, evaluation, and quality assurances, quality control and reporting.

1.1.2 Education Management Information System (EMIS) EMIS is an institutional unit within the Ministry of Education (MoE), responsible for monitoring the operational plan activities at district level, data verification and validation at school level, as well as technical consultation with MoE departments in terms of software/database development, training and maintenance at national and sub-national levels.

1 2. Purpose There is need for a robust assessment of the ISD business process and proposing clear directions for further enhancement of the ISD/MIS.

To manage its functions ISD needs a robust MIS. An ISD-MIS has been developed by ISD. However, all ISD's departments have composed, entered and reported their valuable information/data on numerous excel spread-sheets and formats. The newly MIS development process is paused now and has not got end user test as numerous changes have been proposed and implemented after the initial design. It’s up to consultancy decision whether to Re-engineer the developed code or to develop the software from scratch. If they wish to use the existing code, the same may be made available to them.

3. The Task ISD-MIS should manage and automate the manual system of the ISD.This automation and management should incorporate all processes of the manual system including project need assessment , project planning, technical survey, building design and technical details, BoQ (bill of quantity) and cost estimation of all constructing materials and activities, timeline for the project and even timeline for a single activity within the project, procurement status, contract details of the wining companies, working start permission, (M& E) system/establishment of deviation tracker, request for the payments based on the progress and finally handover of the completed project, archive and registration. The staff should be trained to effectively use the system in their working environment. Following are the short descriptions of all these main components that system should automate it:

 Need assessment: The first step of a projects start from the request of community based on its need/s. The request comes to the regional relevant authorities and assessment takes place there. If the need is found valid, then it becomes part of the plan, if not, then it is not included in the relevant plan.

 Formulation and Appraisal: The planning department after receiving the need assessment forms shares the issue with the relevant program department in order to decide either to consider the projects in the planning process or postpone it to next stage based on the availability of resources.

2  Technical Survey: , This step will begin after selecting the project from the tentative list of school construction projects and will be conducted in two stages, field work and office work. This tentative list of school projects will be generated by the MoE.

Survey component of the system should have forms for the survey entry. It should store all fields of the paper based survey form, although the school ID should be picked in the system from the main EMIS. Each project survey must have GPS coordinates.

 Design (Technical design): The design describes all the technical details and specification of the building including model (map), materials to be used, labor and management staff, etc. The design might have different types both from architectural and structural point of views including electrification, water supply, and HVACsystems.Once it made, it can be used for other projects too. For example a design of school having 12 classes can used for other 12 classes school.

As project design can be made in different designing and modeling software, although some technical specification can be entered to the system in the design component. Similarly the model (map) of the building should also be uploaded to the system as pdf (or other format) file. Later on, this uploaded map and specification files can be easily sent by the system to the procurement process for the tender announcement.

 BoQ and Cost Estimation Systems: Thebill of quantities should be created as per the prepared designs. This step should include the list of different activities (processes) of the project as well all the required materials in digits with their prices. Moreover, every activity or material should be linked with its technical specification defined in the technical design stage. Similarly, BoQ should clearly define the unit cost as well total cost of a single activity (which can be measured by the respective unit, e.g. square meter, cube meter and so on) or construction material. Similar to BoQ, a unit rate analysis system has to created within this mode in order to be responsive to need of ISD and upgradable to the provincial market prices for construction materials.

3 The MIS system should have forms for BoQ to store the BoQ of the above mentioned activities and constructions materials. Similarly, the system should be able to generate the BoQ reports of the project for sending it to the procurement department.

 Scheduling:

It is obvious that every task must be accomplished in a scheduled time manner: construction activities also need to be performed in a timeline. In this phase of the project the timeline for the activities should be defined. All the activities that specified in the BoQ should have specific time span. The user shall be allowed to see the project schedule in various forms such Gantt chart, network logic diagram, and show the critical path of the projects using critical path method (CPM).

The system should implement this feature and should be able to define and link the activity with the timeline. As a plus point, it should be able to generate and issue a notification if the activity is completed and when the time span is finished and the activity is still running. However, all these notification should be based on tracking component (M&E) which is coming later.

 Procurement Status: After completing the above phases, the project should be ready for the procurement. All information including BoQ, timeline, technical details and other documents should be in the procurement documents. These documents should be generated by the system and should be sent automatically to the procurement department.

As already mentioned that technical details should be uploaded to the system as pdf (or other formats) files, though, all these technical documents should also be sent with procurement documents as the attachments. It should include the land approval documents, maps, technical specifications, BoQ and others. Beyond these things, the donor of the project should also be specified in the procurement forms. The tender number and project code should be discussed with procurement department if they are not assigning it then these numbers should also be assigned in the procurement forms. ISD should be able to track the procurement process of the projects and its corresponding details.

 Contract details: Selecting the Construction Company and contract approval is out of the scope of ISD, and it is the responsibility of the procurement department to accomplish these tasks. However, ISD needed to have contract details in their system. The system should store all relevant data of the contract including the company data such as, company profile, etc.

4 All this information should be taken from the procurement department manually or it should be fetched automatically from their system.

 Work start permission: After signing the contract, the work start permission and other relevant data should also be entered to the system. The work start permission might include, work start date, duration and some other rules and policies.The system should computerize the paper based work start permission document.

Creating M&E system and deviation tracker: The ISDMIS system should include the cost/scheduled control selection criteria or and earned value methods in order to monitor the project scheduled and cost aspects. The system should have included all the required indicators (Scheduled performance indexes, cost performance indexes) in order to monitor the health of the project. The M&E dashboard should provide the current status of the all projects and notifications in line with the deadline of the project. Every activity has to be compared with the BoQ with in a time duration and the its report have to be entered in the system. Similarly, a predefined schedule of activities progress should be defined, which will indicate the completion percentage of every single task as well the percentage of the whole project. The system should be able to upload the standard M&E reports including pictures provide by site engineers.The M&E system should have a sub module for deviation tracker on the bases of which the deviation in terms of non- complains with technical design specification are to be reported and the corresponding actions to be recorded.

 Request for payment: In line with project physical and financial status the system should timely generate request for payments and do the calculations. The details of each interim bill processed for payment should be entered in the system with relevant certifications by different engineers. It should be possible to enter quantities mentioned in the interim bill; cumulative quantities executed so far; and review the balance quantities left from the estimated quantities for project monitoring. The records of the payments and relevant calculations, numbers should store in the system to be used for the final payment reports as well for the long term.

 Handover: The final phase of the project is the handover. In this phase the final survey should take place and everythingshould verify as it was in the map and in the technical specifications.

5 The MIS system should be able to record handover process. In this system this process can be realize as a checklist of activities and materials that should be verified with real buildings.

Finally, the handover module should be able to generate a final report of the whole project including its verification survey and to produce a completion letter to be signed by both parties.

 Archive and registration A digital archive system need be created for both design and planning sections of the ISD to enable the user to store and analyze all relevant documents into the system and generate a final customized report of individual or multiple projects.

Note: As some of the school projects might be off budget and they could be constructed by foreign NGOs or other organization, therefore, these projects also need to be stored in the systems. Accordingly, the system should be able to differentiate between off budget and on budget projects.

 Deliverables (According to the needs of the end user): o Refined business process model

o Development and deployment of the system to ensure the functionality of the system for the below components:

1. Need Assessment

2. Formulation and Appraisal

3. Technical Survey

4. Technical Design

5. BoQ and Cost Estimation System

6. Scheduling

7. Procurement Status

8. Contract Details

6 9. Work Start Permission

10. M&E system and deviation tracker

11. Request for Payment

12. Handover

13. Archive and registration

 Training of the ISD staff to use the system.

 Warranty maintenance of the Implemented system for a period of 1 year post implementation.

 Post Warranty support under an Annual Maintenance Plan.(Negotiated between the two parties)

 User Manuals

o End-user manual

 Deliverables (according to the phases of the software development project) o Detailed project plan (MS Project) with milestones, activities and tasks,

o Progress and payment milestones

o Risk Register and Issues Log

o Scope Document

o High Level Design

o Functional and Non-Functional Specifications in Detail

o Testing (includes test scripts and documentation of results)

1. System Test

2. Systems Integration Test

3. Non-Functional (Performance) Test

4. User Acceptance Test

o System Go Live from Production Servers at the MoE Data Centre.

7 o Migration and entry of data.

o Technical support manual (includes documentation of source code for support, maintenance and enhancement)

o All source code, documentation and deliverables are to be transferred to EMIS upon completion and full ownership rights assigned to EMIS/ISD

4. The Terms of Reference The Terms of Reference is for a solution provider company to provide the following services:

 Project management of the software development project providing weekly progress updates by way of face-to-face meetings, phone calls and progress reports.

 Development and Implementation of a robust ISD Management Information System through the MoE Data Centre using the .Net framework 4.0 or above. This should enable effective management of the construction activities in the Ministry as brought out above in this document.

 Deployment of the developed system in a production as well as test environment at the MoE data centre.

 .NET web development services and in-depth and proven extensive knowledge of software development over the web based on the following technologies

o Technology should be used according to EMIS approved Technologies.

5. Proposal must include the following  Scope of work statement

 Description of n-tier application architecture

 Description of your software development methodology (SDLC, RAD, etc)

 Detailed project plan with relevant progress and payment milestones

 Risks and Issues

 Resource plan

 Deliverables, specify in which phase of the project and must be aligned to payment milestones

8  Track Record

 Financial Viability (for public companies, your audited financial statements (balance sheet, income statement) for past 3 years; for private companies, your yearly financial filings to Company House for past 3 years

 References (please provide 3 reference client sites of similar project size, complexity and technology;

 A detailed cost for all required and optional components of the solution

 Identify all additional expenses required to complete implementation that are not shown in the above costs

6. Deliverables and Timeline Sr. No. Deliverable Timeline 1. Inception Report 1 Week Consultations and Workshop with stakeholders / Requirements 2. 4 Weeks Elicitation and Business Process Mapping 3. Selection of Technologies and Architectural Design 1 Week Iterative development of ISD system (Design / Implement / 4. 28 Weeks analyze) 5. Deployment and Acceptance testing 2 Week 6. Presentation and Review 1 Week 7. Training of ISD Staff on using the system 3 Weeks

7. Proposed Team of Experts: Sr. Expected Time Degree and Experience Experts Numbers No. of Engagement Project Manager 1 University degree with at least 1. 40 Weeks 10 years’ experience. Requirement Engineers 2 Bachelor degree in computer 2. 6 Weeks science with 5 years of system analysis experience Infrastructure and 1 Bachelor degree in civil Engineering Expert Engineering or relevant field 3. 12 Weeks and 5 years of experience in construction engineering process flow Software Developer / 4 Bachelors’ degree in Programmer information systems or 4. 32 Weeks computer science with at least five years’ experience 5. Database Expert 1 8 Weeks Bachelors’ degree in

9 Sr. Expected Time Degree and Experience Experts Numbers No. of Engagement information systems or computer science with at least five years’ experience Software tester 1 Bachelors’ degree in information systems or 6. 4 Weeks computer science with at least five years’ experience

8. Payment Schedule Payment Instalment Contractors Performance (As per the phases) amount Number (Percentage)

Inception report, providing consulting expectations & deliverables, outlines component specific proposed 1 10% methodology and tools, implementation strategy (including detailed work plan), and tentative outline for the deliverables.

Software Requirement Specification (SRS) and system 2 design including the requirements for this systems, back end 20% design and front end interface design

3 Test of the system and pilot installation of the system 40%

Deployment and presentation of the system including all the 4 documentations of Information Systems Development 30% standards.

* 5% performance security will be withheld from the final payment till the completion of one year warranty period (One year starting from deployment/acceptance of the product).

9. Terms  The duration for this task is 10 Months.

 No rights are to be assigned to any third parties

 No rights accorded to successful company to make references to ISD in any media, advertisement or proposal without the expressed written authorization of ISD.

10 Total development duration for vendor: 10 Months.

10. Contact person from client’s side

The client would designate one of its engineers to be the contact person for the consultant. This person would be responsible to interact with the consultant for administrative and technical matters on day to day basis; comment / approve the deliverables submitted by the consultant within the stipulated time; certify consultants bills and ensure timely payment etc..