Web Based Procurement Management System for Government Universities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Currently government universities in Sri Lanka are facing a lot of difficulties when they try to purchase required capital and consumable items using the existing manual procurement process due to the inefficiency of the manual processes. This study focuses on analyzing, designing, and implementing a centralized web-based procurement management system for the government universities in Sri Lanka that will help to improve the quality and the efficiency of the entire procurement process. This project is envisioned with the focus of delivering an acceptable solution to these problems. The main object of this study is to develop a web-based application which is capable to assist the university staff to execute the procurement related processes with the minimum effort and minimum time allocation. Each government university of Sri Lanka has been given facility to registered with the developed system. Inter university administration is done by the super admin user role at the UGC and the internal administration of an individual university is assigned to university admin user role. Inventory owners of each university will be given access to create purchase request through the proposed system and they will be able to monitor the status of the purchase request by login to the system. All the purchase request approval process is handled by the system. System will send email notifications to its’ end users with informing the latest events. Suppliers will be notified about the new bid request via the proposed system. Also, they will be able to securely upload their bids to the system using a cryptographic encryption method. Further, bid opening is also implemented as fully online process without having any physical gathering. Object oriented methodology and UML was used as the analysis and design approach. Incremental and iterative software development methodology is used for the development of this web application. PHP with MVC CodeIgniter framework is used as the server-side programming language of this system. MySQL is used as the backend database. Ajax, Jquery, JavaScripts, CSS, are used for the client-side development. Meanwhile this system support in any web browsers including google chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari. Since this is a web-based system, it could be operated in any GUI based operating system like Windows or Linux. Apart from that, the system is developed using the live hosting environment with live testing. According to the user evaluation and feedback, this system provides better solution to the identified problem at the beginning.