ATTACHMENT REPORT

BY

DAVIE MTEGHA (CEN 01/10/13)

A REPORT SUBMITTED TO COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

UNIVERSITY OF LIVINGSTONIA
LAWS CAMPUS

2016

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

have taken efforts in this project. However, it would not have been possible without the
kind of support and help of many individuals and organisation. I would like to extend my
sincere thanks to all of them.
I

I am highly indebted to northern region water board for their guidance and constant
supervision as well as for providing necessary information regarding the project and also
for their support in competing the project.
I would like to express my gratitude towards my parents and especially my sister for her
kind co-operation and encouragement which helped mi complete the internship period.
I would like to express my special gratitude and thanks to supervision persons for giving
me such attention and time, University of Livingstonia and my fellow colleges in
developing the system.

INTRODUCTION
University of Livingstonia as an education institution sends its students to various places for
internship. Students are attached to both Governmental and Non-governmental Institutions. The
attachment program is based on practical training experience that prepares trainees for the tasks
they are expected to perform on completion of their degree program. The internship at Mzuzu
water board under the synod of Livingstonia development department was meant to provide an
opportunity for the computer engineering students and myself as one of them to apply principles
and techniques theoretically learnt into real life problem solving situations and enable students to
have knowledge practically in developing or performing the required task. This report is an
account of two months field attachment at Northern Region Water Board in Mzuzu district.
BACKGROUND OF NORTHERN REGION WATERBOARD
Northern region water board is a parastatal organisation established and reconstituted under the
water works act no. 17 of 1995. The mandate of northern region water board is to supply water to
urban and rural area of northern region Malawi. The mission of the board is to ensure that all
people in the northern region have safe drinking water. Thus, the board shall sustainably develop,
construct, maintain and operate water works.
The customer base for the board consists of individual households, institutions, commercial
entities and communal water points. The water sources for the board consist of surface and
ground.

PROPOSED PROJECT
Our proposed project is a real time implementation of an online inventory control system for
Northern Region Water Board. This is web application that interact with database used for
storing and administering all types of data required for efficient and accurate warehouse
management. This may include modules or field for keeping track of all items and locations,
requisition, back orders, required levels of inventory on hand, reordered, required levels
inventory on hand, and reordered points, lead times, inventory error tracking, and more. The
scope of this project will centralize all inventory of the company for monitoring.
Currently at Northern Region Water Board registration of chemicals in store, registration of
Water levels at a dam, water treatment measures, daily water production, pump types that are
used, pump Uptime and downtime, water test records and staff duty roster are kept in record
using manual filing system. This means that they must record amount of chemicals used on water

every day, stuff on duty, levels of water at their specified dams and monitoring the mechanical
faults which include pump monitoring and checking previous records manually. Manual filing
system main disadvantage is that it take time to access data. It can take minutes if not hours to
allocate a few files in a large paper filing system. This wastes valuable man hours and is a rather
simple task to automate. It is also found that data can get out of order if someone accidentally put
a file in the wrong place, or take the file out of the cabinet and forget to put it back.
We propose a solution to this issue by developing online inventory control system that keeps
track of inventory. This system will also allow user to quickly check whether information already
exist somewhere in the system and prevent file redundant and data loss.
PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT
-

Keeping track of the type and amount of chemicals used in water treatment tagging the
operator on specified dates.
Recoding water production and distribution, and also to track water wastage.
Provide online staff duty roster for specified location.
Register pump types that are used and generate duration to when its no longer
functioning.
Record the time when the pump has been in operation on daily basis.
Monthly total bills of particular area must tally with the main meter reading total of that
particular area.
Showing the daily water production in balance to power usage.
Record water test
Keep track of the previous water level records at the dam.

GOAL OF THE PROJECT

The project aims at providing an efficient interface to Northern Region Water Board for
managing inventory. The basic idea involved here is that the system should be able to present,
make a number of calculations and enable easy analysis of various inventory.
USERS OF THE PRODUCT
The main users of the product would be management team and staff. The management team
would be able to login in and insert, delete data in the inventory. All member of staff should be
able to register, and log in to view various inventory. Approval of user will be done by admin
(System Engineer), who will also have access to manipulate all inventory in the system.
Staff member would be responsible for recording and checking online duty the roster which will
synchronously compute the work working hours.

REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
-

Hard drive 250GB

Random Access Memory 4GB
Processor Intel processor, 2.0 GHz or higher

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
-

WampServer2.5
PHP, html, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax
Windows 7
Notepad++, sublime text editor
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8

BUSINESS SCOPE PRESENTED BY MR FRANCIS MUNTHALI

RECORD KEEPING

Water levels at a dam and treatment measures

Record chemicals used (target the operator and user of chemicals)

STORES INVERTORY
Registers chemicals (inside stores and used)

PUMP MORNITOR
Register pump types that are used

Uptime and downtime

Registers power in use and powered by operator (power monitor)

STUFF DUTY ROSTER

Register stuff at operation points

Tick time and date the stuff is on duty

WATER PRODUCTION INVERTORY

Record daily production at specified points

Record amount of water at specified reservoirs

Back meter tracking

WATER TEST RECORD INVERTORY

Recording results at given points

USER OF THE SYSTEM

Plant managers and operators, Quality analysis team, the manager of the system and the manager
of northern region water board.
System Engineer
A computer systems engineer is someone who combines their knowledge of computer science,
engineering, and mathematical analysis to develop, test and evaluate software.

Uses the requirements to understand what system is to be developed. As such, a system

engineer maybe required to do various kinds of tasks based on the project:
A system engineer can be in the development project and as a developer he is required to
write code in programming language that the project is based upon.
Can be in the maintenance project where enhancement into an already built project based
on clients requirements is required. The language that will be required herein should
depend on the programming language of the project.
System engineer can be in the support project where support forms an important function
for project maintenance. As such, responsibilities for a system engineer are as follows:
Coordinate development tasks to include design, integration and formal
testing
Oversees all transitions into production
Develop and complete actions in system specifications, technical and
logistical requirements and other disciplines
Create and maintain programmatic and technical documentation to insure
efficient planning and execution
Manage and document system configurations

System or Project Manager

They decide on the usefulness and appropriateness of contributions that are made by the wider
developer community. They also usually add the patch to the code and therefore act as chief
implementer on the project. A project manager can select a process model suitable for a
particular project.
Decides which quality factors are important for the particular project (e.g. high reliability
and maintainability).
The project manager is the one who chooses what process model to use (e.g. waterfall or
prototyping). Therefore, He needs to select a package of techniques and tools that fit
within the process model.

An explicit project manager or management group is generally in place on open source

projects. They decide on the usefulness and appropriateness of contributions that are
made by the wider developer community. They also usually add the patch to the code and
therefore act as chief implementer on the project.
The project manager can identify a number of obvious risks. These threats are anything
that might adversely affect the project success, deadline or cost.

System Operator
A person who runs a computer server. In general, a system operator is the one who runs day to
day operations of the server and the team suggests a person who is available when the system is
and is called administrator. And an administrator in this case is a system engineer.
He is the actual user of the system and is responsible with following duties:

Enter commands using computer terminal, and activate controls on computer and
peripheral equipment to integrate and operate equipment.
Monitor the system for equipment failure or errors in performance.
Operate spreadsheet programs and other types of software to load and manipulate data
And produce reports.

SYSTEM SPECIFICATION AND DESIGN

User requirements for the proposed system the chemical stock inventory system should be able
to display all registered chemicals and suppliers in the database to the system administrator as
how much are the remaining chemicals and in this case is algae flock and chlorine. Have a userfriendly interface and user guides understandable by people of average computing skills. be able
to handle multiple users at the same time and with the same efficiency.
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SYSTEM
An overview of the implementation and explains how users can navigate through the newly
developed tool in order to use it easily. Form input and Reports Design the system was
developed as an interactive mechanism between the user at the interface and the database using
the web-browser. This tool enables a user through a web browser to interact with the MYSQL
database to enter, edit, view and retrieve such data as per the privileges granted. These activities
were achieved using PHP language. HTML forms offer the best layout to enter data, change and
view the database. These forms were also kept as short and simple as possible for easy public
awareness on the use of the tool, some of the forms and report interfaces created include the
following: The login form must be filled correctly.
This is where a user starts; the individual is required to provide a username and password. When
this is provided the system validates the user if the entered information tallies with what is in the

database. He/she is then logged in otherwise the user is not logged in. you must be a registered
user either admin or operator.
This registering is strictly preserved for the system administrator. He/she is the only one with the
privileges to access and use this form. The link leading to this page is disabled for ordinary users.
System Modules and Components the system was implemented as a web-based online chemical
stock management system and modification solution using MYSQL server, Java web server,
Internet explorer as the main browser and accessible on the World Wide Web; other web
browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome are also used. The implementation
and deployment was made successfully using N-tier architecture. Web security and accessibility
to the system is ensured shortcomings with the System.

LIMITATIONS OF THE PROJECT

Working space was too small for the four of us at the northern region water board. The
heat inside the room made us sleepy due to this problem hence occupying much of our

time.
Time factor was the greatest barrier to the successful completion of this system since it
had to be done within the two month period of attachments. I also had financial

constraints since all the activities involved were self-sponsored.

Their local area network was too slow for us to access internet hence we took too much
time to write a code without the help of the internet it was also hard to develop some

bootstraps and templates.

The change in the system specification by the officials made the change in the whole
system as such we were forced to start a new system as the final specifications were

presented to us.
The main challenge was the system itself, starting from requirements analysis,
specification, coding and testing, designing phase to implementation which we were

required to present before we left.

We did not use much of their supervision apart from the school supervisors hence we
followed our own way of developing a system hence it was a big challenge to us as we
used the little idea we had rather than upgrading some ideas from their supervision.

Recommendations

My attachment project and my finalization of this system, I highly recommend that the
kawiluwilu chemical stock management system serves to be the best to be put in use especially
in the 21st century where human beings are embracing technology.
The following are recommendations which I came up with in this two months period of my
attachment. These recommendations will help us to make use of attachment period effectively
and be essential to the students.

When allocating students to different NGOs or cooperatives for attachment you should
agree on the area of study as some computer engineering students ended up doing social

science students attachments rather than developing a system as it is in their field.

The school should also find out from the supervisors in the attachment fields before
allocating the students if the activities are being run in their fields. This is to avoid public
health students developing a web based system.

Conclusion
The main aspect behind online chemical stock management system is that it enabled us to bring
out the new ideas that were sustained within us for many for many days. This project offers the
operators from various plants or schemes to request the required chemicals over the internet to
the manager or finance director who does much of the issuing. Developing a good system is
critical to the success of the system to prevent system failures and to gain wide acceptance as the
best method available. A good chemical stock system requires some characteristics which this
system already has. These are Accuracy, Convenience, Reliability, Verifiability, Flexibility,
Consistency, and Privacy. In analyzing, designing, implementing, and maintaining standards, we
considered these characteristics as the foundation. These standards were made priority. Northern
region water board system will consume less time.

Bibliography