Expand
The steps in this section, 3-Expand, may or may not apply to your situation, depending on the scope of your implementation and your decision to start with a pilot or a national-scale deployment. There is no right or wrong way to go about implementing an electronic LMIS system – whether starting with a small pilot in a limited number of facilities and programs or beginning with a full-scale national deployment managing all facilities and products in a country.
Regardless of your choice, this section may help you revisit and rethink some of the activities and considerations you may need to take into account during the duration of your implementation.
Important note: The content in this section will continue to be developed and augmented as further resources are contributed to the Toolkit. Please check back often.
Community
At every step in the implementation of an electronic LMIS, engaging with and consulting the OpenLMIS Community is a critical step for understanding how to take advantage of new features and releases and learn from the combined experience of over 20 global health, implementation, and technical partners.
The partners in the OpenLMIS Community have years of experience implementing electronic HIS systems, not only OpenLMIS.
By engaging with the OpenLMIS Community at the start of your implementation, you will be familiar with Community Processes, learn from Community forum discussions, and understand best practices in LMIS implementation. The Community can provide resources for all aspects of your implementation, from support for developers, guidance on project governance, project management, and implementation lead support.
Contact the Community Manager if you would like to learn more about joining the OpenLMIS Community or would like to talk about additional support from Community partners.
Governance
Stakeholder Buy-In
After the initial deployment of OpenLMIS, preparation for additional expansion or scale-up can begin. Depending on the scale and scope of the initial implementation, expansion could mean many things. It may include scale-up to include more facilities, users, geographic zones etc., or it may be adding additional programs to the system that were not using it initially. Expansion could also mean that new features or services are rolled out, such as the Stock Management or Vaccine services/feature sets available in OpenLMIS. It may also mean further integration with other HIS/MIS. Any changes or additions to the existing implementation will need ongoing stakeholder buy-in and engagement to ensure that support from partners and stakeholders is ongoing for the next phases.
Read more about sustainability considerations.
Sustainability
All OpenLMIS implementations should consider how to make the implementation sustainable. The MoH or other local partners should be able to take ownership of the system and continue to maintain it after the initial project funding the deployment is complete. There are a number of considerations to be made:
- Support and maintenance costs (licensing and hosting for OpenLMIS and any other reporting or monitoring systems)
- Skill and capability for technical support at MoH/local partner
- Reference and master data management
- System administration
- Need for ongoing development of bug fixes or new features
- Additional support provided by the project (such as providing dongles or airtime, hardware, etc.)
- Training strategy
Working with the MoH and/or local partners and stakeholders to address these issues and plan for them early on in the project will help ensure that OpenLMIS is a sustainable solution for a country’s logistics management information needs and does not need ongoing support from donors or implementing organizations.
Project Management
When planning an expansion of an implementation, it is similar to planning an implementation from the start, but in this case the system is already in place.
Planning for the expansion will require the implementation team to go back to the getting started and planning stages, and repeat those steps for the planned expansion.
Key documents or sections to be updated or recreated based on the scope of the desired expansion of the system, either by number of users/facilities or expanding the use of functionality within the system:
- Requirements (user story template)
- Updated stakeholder analysis (have stakeholders and/or their interests changed?)
- Cost estimates
- Scoping
- Project plan
- Training plan (update? Create new plan?)
- M&E plan
- Project charter
- Training materials (are updates or new materials required)?
- UAT plans/test scripts
- Deployment plan (update based on the new scope)
- Support plan (update if necessary)