**RAMSES **I

Relief Aid Management System for Emergency Shipments

Introduction:

Overview:

This program keeps track of shipments of commodities as they are brought into the country, stored, and disbursed through distribution centers around the country.

The basic unit of input is the waybill, of which there are two classes:

1. Incoming Shipments: These record the importation of food shipments into the country from the most proximate port of lading. Keeping track of this information tells you how much food from different donors you have brought into the country and, combined with the data from internal distribution, below, tells you how much food you should have left undistributed in your warehouses at any given time.
2. Internal Distribution: This is the shipping record/waybill (also called Authority to Collect, or ATC) of shipments from the local storehouse (called an EDP) to the local Distribution Center, where the food is actually disbursed to the hungry. Keeping track of this information tells you how much you have distributed to the people -- in total, by region, by district, by month, by year to date, by Donor, by SI, etc. In addition, this module has an automatic billing / charge calculation component. It calculates the expected transport charges based on the tonnage and distances. This can be used to verify the bills issued by the transporters, and calculate transport charges by area, SI, period, etc, or any combination thereof.

Each of these datasets can be recorded and reported on separately and independently of each other, but together they combine synergistically to give a much better overall picture; for instance, to estimate how much food you have left in a warehouse, you have to know how much has come in and how much has gone out.

Motivation:

There are several other commodity tracking programs available -- why another? Let’s face facts -- some of these other systems can be difficult to interfais with. Workers (and even managers) in the development community occasionally have more important issues to struggle with than computer literacy. DOS based packages, while potentially sophisticated, have not been noted for ease of use. The guiding principle behind every phase of Ramses development has been ease and clarity of use. This has of course been a goal in other systems, but Ramses benefits from the advantage of being developed in the Microsoft Windows environment, which is structurally more user friendly than DOS.

Because Ramses uses the latest software development tools, the development cycle is much faster. This means that new features can be added quickly and cheaply, allowing for quick customization for specialized needs. For example, this version of Ramses was developed in three months for a cost of less than US$6000 (not counting the time, effort and costliness of management). This makes customization possible in locations around the world which have been unable to use existing standard packages because of unique local conditions, but have heretofore been unable to afford the standard costs of customized programs, which typically cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a year or more to develop.

Ramses also attempts to provide a bigger picture by combining low level distribution data with large scale grain movements to track the grain from foreign port to needy recipient.

Features:

If data is entered correctly (the greatest vulnerability of the system) Ramses can report:

• How much relief food was picked up, distributed, lost, or damaged throughout the country by Distribution Center, EPA, District, EDP and/or SI Number; for any given month or range of months.
• Calculate expected transporter charges by individual shipment, center, EPA, district and EDP totals for a given month or range of months for verification of transporter billing.
• Compare all transporters used in a given period to report on total mileages, charges, tonnages carried and lost, and percentage of load lost or damaged for each transporter. Can be used to identify patterns if some transporters have consistently high losses, etc.
• Compare food targeting (in Metric Tons) with actual deliveries for any month or range of months by EPA, District and EDP.
• How many tons were delivered to each EDP, how many tons were distributed from each EDP, and thus how many tons should be remaining at each EDP (by SI or in aggregate), for any selected period.
• Trace SI commitments from foreign ports of loading to domestic EDP’s, districts, and EPA’s. For each SI, report the total commitment amount; the amount of initial commitment which has been collected from the external ports and delivered to the EDP’s, the amount of that which has been actually disbursed at the distribution centers, and the balance of the committed amount not yet delivered to the EDP’s.

Future Directions:

This version of Ramses provides a framework of basic services for essential reporting. Some future goals include:

Drill Down:

(Greater detail and analysis in-country)

• Transport Cost Projections: With the data already collected for Targeting and Distribution Centers, it will be possible to estimate transport costs for any period (month, quarter, total emergency duration), by district, region, SI, etc.
• Beneficiary Reporting: Again, with the data already collected, Ramses II will report on number of beneficiaries expected, number reached, average distribution per beneficiary, by district, region, month, etc.
• Distribution / Delivery Comparisons: Food that gets delivered to centers but not distributed to recipients is a big problem. Ramses II will identify and report those centers which have the greatest problems.
• Food Budget Projections: Project total grain requirements or by district or EPA for any given month, period, or duration of entire relief project.
• Collect data directly from the transporter on uplift information. Ramses now collects data only when shipments have been received at the district and the completed waybill has been forwarded to TLU. Consequently, the data is typically weeks or months old, and there is no way to identify shipments which have been loaded and sent out from the warehouse but not received, or waybills that have been lost. The transport broker typically collects the essential uplift information every day on a primitive dBase or spreadsheet system. Ideally, this data should be provided on disk by the transport broker and loaded automatically into Ramses II to provide up to the minute sit reps (situation reports) and to help track shipments which have gone astray.
• Food for Work: Food Accounting Module -- Collect data on food for work projects, participants, beneficiaries; HSD’s (Homo Sapiens Days) of work projected, performed, paid, etc.

Blow Up:

(Bigger Picture)

• Track the shipments and commitments farther back to the source. This information is generally available, but occasionally not well co-ordinated. In those rare instances when a donor expresses interest in the disposition and status of its donation, incorporating this data into Ramses II will allow WFP to print up a quick but complete status report while the donor waits on hold from, say, an unnamed capital of the world’s remaining superpower.
• Combining the large and small pictures, Ramses II will use future shipping schedules with the Targeting Projections to plan shipments, reduce storage costs and spoilage, and monitor grain reserves compared with projected arrivals and requirements.