Management Information System for Plant Virus Indexing Centre

Abstract

Plant Virus Indexing Centre (PVIC) is a government institute established under Department of Agriculture at Gabadawatte, Homagama in 1999. Mandate of this institute is to carry out a wide range of agricultural research activities. These include investigations on plant viruses and other pathogenic organisms infesting fruits, vegetables, root and tuber crops, foliage and flowers and other agricultural crops. It consists of 5 acres of land, extent 3 acres are being utilized for field research investigations. For the time being the institute is using a manual file system for manage their operational and financial information, as a result the administration was facing problems such as unreliable data, redundant data, inaccurate data and delay in decision making due to unavailability of timely reports and information. The web based Management Information System (MIS) is built to overcome some of the problems and inefficiencies of existing manual system. This solution provides management for overall information of the institute regarding plant virus and other diseases identification tests, research projects, laboratory wise activities, store, production , sales, financial data and report generation, The system is mostly been developed using open source softwares and tools adapting Model View Controller (MVC) architecture and developed according to Rational Unified Process (RUP) framework which supports Object Oriented concepts. The sever-side scripting language Hypertext pre-processor (PHP) was used to build the system. Apache was the used server and MySQL was used to handle databases. In addition Unified Modeling Language was used for analysis and design. The Management Information System is a web based system which has been designed according to client requirements. Furthermore it makes possible to monitor and control whole process of the institute while increasing staff collaboration.