Design

Developed initially in the fall of 2012 with significant contributions from PATH, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities (UNCoLSC) and others, and with strong support from JSI through the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT, VillageReach and ThoughtWorks began development on the first release of OpenLMIS, an open-source logistics management information system (LMIS). The initial OpenLMIS code base (v0.9) was developed for national deployments in Tanzania and Zambia in late 2013 under the name “eLMIS,” and OpenLMIS has also been deployed in Mozambique, Benin, Cote D’Ivoire and more.

As new installations of OpenLMIS were developed and deployed, challenges surfaced related to the OpenLMIS software internals.  A key challenge was the inability to easily extend the code base, which resulted in a “code fork” between the Tanzania and Zambia eLMIS implementations and the Mozambique and Benin OpenLMIS v1.0 implementations.  An exhaustive list of features in various releases is found in the Feature Variability Matrix.

In an effort to address the fork, the community agreed to begin working toward a common master branch, and in September, the community also agreed that a single, “core” code line was required.This effort to re-work the OpenLMIS code is referred to as the "Re-Architecture" of OpenLMIS. 

VillageReach and partners have worked to make the re-architecture process as transparent as possible through clear documentation available on the OpenLMIS Wiki. 

The Design section of the wiki covers the background of the OpenLMIS re-architecture effort and working designs, project management for v3.0, and functional documentation for the project.

Any questions or feedback regarding the re-architecture process may be directed to any of the Google Groups Committee Forums (must be a member of a group to comment), or directly to info@openlmis.org.