Informational Meeting-International Red Cross, India

Date August 25, 2020

OpenLMIS participants: Wesley Brown, Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed), 

Shikah Chopra- Info Systems Manager for Indian Red Cross Society

Background:

She is familiar with OpenLMIS and have it installed. She wants to introduce their wish list and 

They focus on blood centers, blood banks, and disaster management

For disaster mgmt they have a limited number of products–they are not medicines, 

Saw our standard classifications based on the medicines names, but their items are more like food items, water filters, tarpooling, t shirts, etc.

They have 6 national level warehouses and local warehouses in each state. Then products go to a disaster site. 

Delhi (national level)→States (these are under control of state-level societies)-->districts→facilities. 

Currently doing inventory mgmt with paper-based system, also no electronic warehouse system

Plan to modernize the warehouses and want an info system with real time stock situation, want to know minimum level stock updates; 

• administration, product codes, etc can be handled by the national level
• staff here is not very tech saavy
• storekeepers dont know how to operate computers, low tech capacity
• 1st level want to do stock updates, 2nd then ask them to put it into OpenLMIS, then step 3 to have a WMS

Funds available: do not have funds to hire a vendor, no funding source. Propose to ICRC to support. Hosting will not be an issue, but need help with selection of 'a package'; want a technical requirement from OpenLMIS to host on AWS

Single time training at national HQ and then they can take the responsibility of cascading down 

Implementation Options:

• implementing partners
• funding source–minimum funding requirement

Desired scope: Initially just stock mgmt and hosting help with AWS; they might be interested in becoming an implementing partner; they might want to take it up and

want to try to install themselves; configuration; just need global level support (perhaps a freelancer from one of our partners)? 

Interested to build the capacity in India; want to showcase how this can be an open source solution for disaster mgmt organizations; other disaster solutions are not open source and very expensive; they want to create an example and showcase that this can be done locally

Advise from Wes: you will need project mgmt; will need to be some kind of contract/partner

Next steps:

How can we partner with Indian Red Cross society?  Shikha is a one- man show–she would do the bulk of the work. Has LMIS experience from MoH

Ready to fund for 1-2 technical resources/consultancies; for 1-2 months; there might be some customizations required. They are looking for outsourced development/configurations