June 20 2017

Call Information

  • 6:00AM PDT - Seattle
  • 9:00AM EDT - New York, DC
  • 4:00PM EAT - Tanzania
  • 9:00PM GMT +8 - China
  • Webex Link: Link
  • Meeting Number: 192 173 465
  • Host Key: 352864
  • Audio Connection +1-415-655-0001 



AGENDA

ItemLead (Time)Notes

Upcoming changes

  • Design for new table sorts ( OLMIS-1354 - Getting issue details... STATUS ) and soon we will start implementing OLMIS-2655 - Getting issue details... STATUS . Requesting input on default sorts.
  • Rejected status: Review the proposed state in Requisition States and Workflow. MW-244 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Requested new features

  • User input date for when the paper requisition was received. The point being that one can see if the delay of submission was due to the paper form arriving versus the data entry of it. I heard this request from Malawi and perhaps in Tanzania, others?
  • Informal requisitions (more like purchase orders). Has there been a dialogue about this need in Tanzania or Zambia? For instance, allowing Hospitals to 'search for products' versus only seeing a pre-approved list? Minimal approvals potentially. Thoughts?

Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated)

(45 min)


Sorts

  • Gaurav asked about the sorts and how they apply.
  • Ashraf brought up the arrows in the table headers is intuitive design.
  • Mary Jo asked the group about ways to incorporate user input on various designs (prior to development).
  • Ashraf brought up reviewing design and usability of other systems.

Rejected status

  • Discussed additional enhancements:

User input date on requisitions

Alpha Nsaghurwe (Unlicensed) indicated this is a good idea from the Tanzania experience with VIMS.

Informal requisitions

Needs more discussion. Alpha Nsaghurwe (Unlicensed) shared experiences in Tanzania and indicated it is really up to SOPs. Hopefully the group can further discuss and gather information on potential use cases.

Logistimo Discussion
Still under evaluation. The governance committee will discuss further.

Software Development Update


Held off on vaccine development for one sprint. Upcoming sprint will focus on tying together the stock management and requisition services while starting on cold chain equipment.

Vaccine features update

  • Senegal workshop moved to July

Held off on development for one sprint. Moving forward again while the team looks into logistimo.
Gap Analysis Update5 minWork is moving forward. Soon features will be uploaded into the wiki for PC review and prioritization.
Malawi Update

ACTION ITEMS:

From last meeting


ATTENDANCE: 

Ashraf Islam (Unlicensed)Amanda BenDor (Unlicensed)Alpha Nsaghurwe (Unlicensed)Gaurav Bhattacharya (Unlicensed)Chris George (Unlicensed)Christine LenihanSam Im (Deactivated)Tenly Snow (Deactivated), Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) 


NOTES: 

Upcoming Changes

  • Table sorts 
    • lots of different ways to sort tables and pages 
    • proposed design shown to PC
    • lots of back and forth on this ticket
  • Guarav: talk more about product code?
  • MJ: centrally defined - based on what the country uses as the product code / id - could use a classification system here as well
  • MJ: any thoughts on the feedback on filtering?
  • no thoughts brought up - looks good to current PC group
  • MJ: should I try to reach out to PC about design work moving forward? any suggestions on if / how to involve PC more on this design work
  • Ashraf: yes, would be a good idea from my perspective - Salesforce.com is an example that has all the bells and whistles in emulating their design approach
  • MJ: users are different than Salesforce.com, and we need to consider mobile and other decisions and offline
  • MJ: has JSI made a small user group to bounce ideas off of? Bring together folks for in-work design? What would be your opinion on superusers to ask them questions on opinion on different designs, prior to development?
  • Ashraf: Few political realities to keep in mind when setting these up to give incentive for involvement - I can arrange for a small session in these upcoming venues
  • MJ: If you can send me some of those dates offline, we can pull together - do a mini survey sort of thing
  • Ashraf: needs to be coordinated, make sure training sessions which alter their schedule has a new session scheduled - will send some dates, then see if that works for you - then I’ll need to coordinate to make room for that session, and then tap into that workshop
  • MJ: cool, we will see if we can make that work
  • Guarav: what are the sort options besides product code?
  • MJ: will depend on the table - each page has a sort by, and based on what we think is useful / possible
  • Ashraf: If you go back to the mockups, if you click on headers will it sort on that?
  • MJ: Lots of convos on pros and cons of arrows on headers - on some screens we don’t want to do that - e.g. lots - mobile also can be difficult to do this
  • Ashraf: If column header had click, more intuitive - more user friendly - but as you said, you had detailed discussion so don’t want to second guess
  • MJ: Some tables would have it, some would not, or smaller screen / window size - this caused the larger group to go the direction of not having the arrows
  • Rejected State
    • MJ: Malawi identified if there is no way to know that something had gotten rejected or not
    • MJ: We have decided to move forward with rejected state - only way for a user right now to know something is rejected they have to click into requisition - can check out comments from person who rejected it - they are getting an email that it is rejected - nothing in experience that shows them rejected status
    • MJ: When in authorize state, that is when someone can reject
    • Gaurav: What happens when rejected, is there something that says why for others to see or know about
    • MJ: System doesn’t have a specific reason to go along with the rejection, this would be new feature, possibly down the line
    • Ashraf: The information does exist to know when it was rejected in the OpenLMIS system - enhancement would be a link to show all the info on that R&R, including rejection - if taking this on as a rejected state, then would be good to consider this enhancement too
    • MJ: So there’s request for reasons being logged; also request to log state change - can put some of these on backlog
    • Ashraf: also another performance indicator on when it was submitted vs. time it was fulfilled - know the fulfillment / response time too
    • Christine: minimum thing requested is that the comment field would be required if someone was rejecting and would have to input this information in order to reject - more granular reasons would also be helpful to report on in addition


Requested New Features

  • MJ: Input the date when the paper request was received - user-defined date associated with the requisition - have others come across this request
  • Alpha: from Tanzania, we are still accepting paper forms, so this is a good idea - required for our VIMS - good idea to have them on reporting forms
  • MJ: Hearing that this is a consistent request for paper form receive date


  • MJ: Have people seen request for informal requisitions that doesn’t need all these approvals - right now we have heavy lifting requisitions - has there ever been a need to make it more like a purchase order? Next meeting we should have more detail on decision in tying these services together
  • Alpha: this has more to do with SOP of the country - e.g. in Tanzania we have received a couple requests from cancer people + hospitals - receive money from other sources - medical officer can receive funding from partner, and buy products outside of normal process flow / SOP - in that case they want to buy one or two items from central medical store, so not accepting any requests like this from eLMIS, but not within SOP, so can’t do it right now - probably coming up in the future
  • Alpha: also, based on emergency requisitions, some of the hospitals don’t have enough funds to procure the fully supply they need b/c in TZ they have to buy from central medical store - so what they do is procure what they can at that time - we suggest emergency order, but it’s not really an emergency order, they are just replenishing their stock when they get money - so would be good to track this as a regular replenishment need
  • MJ: If they had an option to just procure without the reporting side, just doing requisition - would that be usable? and if so, would still go through all of the same approvals? Or is something that can go more directly to the central medical store?
  • Alpha: raised two key points: 1) cannot procure without reporting at the moment - loop hole if just can procure w/o reporting as others may want to do this, will compromise supply chain, 2) have to request from approvers before it goes to central medical store


Logistimo Options Discussion

  • MJ: still in convos with Logistimo - how we can integrate and incorporate - lots of vaccine functionality is already in Logistimo, and although doesn’t match all needs, trying to evaluate as it has a lot - is a monolith architecture, not microservices - will go to the governance committee, still in dialogue at the moment
  • MJ: Governance still going back and forth about the Global Digital Health Forum abstracts


Software Development Update


Vaccine Feature Update


Member Updates


Gap Analysis Update

  • MJ: Things moving forward - planning on wrapping up docs at end of this month - then come to this committee for review - needs to have people review docs before a phone call - heads up we’ll need pre-reads to have strong dialogue on the call - then will move to recommend to USAID on what features we will start to build out


Malawi Update




RECORDING

Video: OpenLMIS Product Committee-20170620 1259-1.arf (download the WebEx video player here)



ADDITIONAL READING:

Requisition States and Workflow

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