The Challenge: Managing Public Health Requisitions

In many public health systems—especially in low- and middle-income countries—requisitions are a foundational process. Health facilities must regularly request the medical supplies, vaccines, and commodities they need from central warehouses or district stores. But in practice, requisition processes are often:

• Manual and paper-based, leading to delays and data entry errors
• Disconnected from stock data, making it hard to know what’s needed or available
• Prone to inconsistencies, with no standardized format across facilities
• Difficult to track, making accountability and follow-up nearly impossible

These inefficiencies don’t just affect logistics—they directly impact patient care. A delayed or inaccurate public health requisitions can mean stockouts, expired products, or wasted resources on a national scale.

The Use Case: A Typical Requisition Workflow

Imagine a health facility in a rural district. Every month, a staff member must:

1. Estimate the required quantity of medicines for the next month
2. Fill out a requisition form (on paper or in Excel)
3. Submit the form to a district or regional office
4. Wait for approval, adjustments, and eventual delivery

At each step, there’s potential for errors, bottlenecks, or miscommunication—especially if stock records are outdated or communication lines are slow.

How OpenLMIS Helps

OpenLMIS is an open-source logistics management information system built specifically for the challenges of public health supply chains. Its public health requisitions management feature transforms the entire process from manual to streamlined and data-driven.

Example Requisitions Workflow in OpenLMIS

 

OpenLMIS offers a comprehensive requisition management with flexible features designed to support your specific needs. To help you understand the system’s capabilities, we will now go through the exemplary workflow, shortly explaining each of the steps.

1. Creating and submitting requisition

Level: Facility
User: Storeroom Manager 

Creating a requisition is one of the most important responsibilities at the facility level. This process ensures that the right quantities of medical supplies and products are ordered in a timely manner — supporting continuous care and preventing stockouts.

Storeroom Managers typically begin by creating a requisition under a specific program (pre-configured in the system by the Administrator). Once a program is selected, OpenLMIS automatically displays a list of related products, making it easy to start entering data. Each country’s setup can define its own schedule for when requisitions need to be submitted.

The core of this process takes place in the Report and Requisition section:

Here, the user can enter the data for specific products. Based on the provided information, the system will calculate stock on hand, average consumption, order quantity, and total requisition cost. Using these insights, the Storeroom Manager can enter the actual requested quantity for each product.

Importantly, all of this can be done offline. The form automatically saves progress, and once the device reconnects to the internet, the data syncs seamlessly with the server.

2. Reviewing and Approving the Requisition

Level: Facility and/or District
User: Store Manager, District Store Manager

Once a requisition is submitted, it enters the approval stage — a critical checkpoint to ensure accuracy and accountability before the order moves forward. The submitted requisition appears in a list of pending reports, visible to the appropriate supervising users. From here, they can review data, make changes, and add comments.

This review process ensures that the requisition reflects the actual needs of the facility and aligns with available stock, budget, or distribution plans. It’s also an opportunity to catch errors early and provide guidance before the requisition moves further along the supply chain.

3. Program-Level Approval

User: Program Supervisor

At this stage, the requisition has already passed through facility and/or district-level review. Now it reaches the Program Supervisor — a higher-level user responsible for final approval before the order proceeds to fulfillment. The data entered earlier can no longer be edited — the supervisor’s role is to review the submitted requisition and indicate the approved quality for each product.

This step ensures that requisitions are aligned with broader supply chain and program priorities, providing oversight and final confirmation before products are allocated and dispatched.

The requisition report can be printed. The printed copy includes requested products, budget details and approval history:

4. Converting the Requisition to an Order

Once the requisition is approved, it’s time to move from planning to action. The next step is to convert the approved requisition into an order, which will be sent to the designated warehouse for fulfillment.

Here’s how it works:

• The approved requisition is transformed into a formal order, ready for processing by the warehouse.
• Once the warehouse fills the order, it sends back a shipment file to the ordering facility.
• The Storeroom Manager can then generate and print a Proof of Delivery (POD) — a document that will travel with the shipment.

When the delivery arrives at the facility, the receiving team can confirm the received products, indicate discrepancies and log returns. This step closes the loop between request and fulfillment, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the supply chain.

How OpenLMIS Transforms Requisitions

 

The requisition process doesn’t have to be slow, manual, or error-prone. OpenLMIS introduces a smarter, streamlined approach that helps health workers at every level get the supplies they need — accurately and on time. Here are some of the main advantages of managing this challenging process with OpenLMIS:

Standardized, Digitized Requisitions

• Every facility works within the same digital system.
• Requisition forms are generated automatically based on configured product lists, forecasting rules, and reporting periods.

Data-Driven Forecasting

• Pulls from real consumption and stock-on-hand data to recommend order quantities.
• Reduces guesswork and improves accuracy.

Approval Workflows

• Supports multi-level approval processes.
• Stakeholders can review, adjust, and approve requisitions in-system, with an audit trail of all changes.

Transparency and Tracking

• Requisitions can be tracked in real-time from submission through fulfillment.
• Eliminates the “black hole” where requests often disappear without feedback.

Integration with Stock Management

• Requisitions can trigger stock transfers or orders within the same system.
• Helps align supply planning with actual need.

These benefits aren’t just theoretical — they’re already making a difference. In The Gambia, OpenLMIS helped streamline medication distribution, improving accuracy, reducing delays, and ensuring that essential medicines reach patients when and where they’re needed.

Final Thoughts

Requisitions might sound like a basic task—but they’re the foundation of effective supply chain management. OpenLMIS brings structure, visibility, and intelligence to this process, helping public health systems deliver the right products to the right places, at the right time.

Want to learn how OpenLMIS can support your requisition process? Get in touch or request a demo.