Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Ministry of Education (MoE)
EMIS Directorate
Terms of Reference (ToR)
Enhancement of ISD-MIS System
1. Background
The Infrastructure Service Department (ISD)of the Ministry of Education is seeking for
qualified vendors classified as Technical Specialists or Solution Providers that can
enhance ISD-MIS system. This document provides the deliverables required in the
response to the call for tender; responses to this request will be evaluated based on the
quantitative and qualitative scoring of the proposal. Responses will also be evaluated for
technical, functional, and procedural methods. Respondents should evaluate this request
and identify all costs associated with including, software maintenance, third party
software, third party software maintenance, implementation, conversion, documentation
and training. The bidder is requested to provide an estimate of all costs associated with
the project. All responses are at the bidder’s cost.
ISD will evaluate the responses to determine which bidder’s solution meets the
organization's requirements. All proposals must provide complete end-to-end solutions,
seamless integration and a description of the maintenance. The end solution will be a
copyright of ISD and all source code will be the property of the Ministry of Education.
No third-party branding is allowed.
1.1 Suppliers
1.1.1
Infrastructure Service Department (ISD)
ISD is one of the technical departments of MoE mandated to manage education
infrastructure projects including planning, surveys, technical design and
estimation of construction projects, monitoring, evaluation, and quality
assurances, quality control and reporting.
1.1.2
Education Management Information System (EMIS)
EMIS is an institutional unit within the Ministry of Education (MoE), responsible
for monitoring the operational plan activities at district level, data verification and
validation at school level, as well as technical consultation with MoE departments
in terms of software/database development, training and maintenance at national
and sub-national levels.
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2. Purpose
There is need for a robust assessment of the ISD business process and proposing clear
directions for further enhancement of the ISD/MIS.
To manage its functions ISD needs a robust MIS. An ISD-MIS has been developed by ISD.
However, all ISD's departments have composed, entered and reported their valuable
information/data on numerous excel spread-sheets and formats. The newly MIS development
process is paused now and has not got end user test as numerous changes have been proposed
and implemented after the initial design. It’s up to consultancy decision whether to Re-engineer
the developed code or to develop the software from scratch. If they wish to use the existing code,
the same may be made available to them.
3. The Task
ISD-MIS should manage and automate the manual system of the ISD.This automation
and management should incorporate all processes of the manual system including project
need assessment , project planning, technical survey, building design and technical
details, BoQ (bill of quantity) and cost estimation of all constructing materials and
activities, timeline for the project and even timeline for a single activity within the
project, procurement status, contract details of the wining companies, working start
permission, (M& E) system/establishment of deviation tracker, request for the payments
based on the progress and finally handover of the completed project, archive and
registration. The staff should be trained to effectively use the system in their working
environment. Following are the short descriptions of all these main components that
system should automate it:

Need assessment:
The first step of a projects start from the request of community based on its need/s.
The request comes to the regional relevant authorities and assessment takes place
there. If the need is found valid, then it becomes part of the plan, if not, then it is not
included in the relevant plan.

Formulation and Appraisal:
The planning department after receiving the need assessment forms shares the issue
with the relevant program department in order to decide either to consider the projects
in the planning process or postpone it to next stage based on the availability of
resources.
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
Technical Survey:
, This step will begin after selecting the project from the tentative list of school
construction projects and will be conducted in two stages, field work and office work.
This tentative list of school projects will be generated by the MoE.
Survey component of the system should have forms for the survey entry. It should store
all fields of the paper based survey form, although the school ID should be picked in the
system from the main EMIS. Each project survey must have GPS coordinates.

Design (Technical design):
The design describes all the technical details and specification of the building including
model (map), materials to be used, labor and management staff, etc. The design might
have different types both from architectural and structural point of views including
electrification, water supply, and HVACsystems.Once it made, it can be used for other
projects too. For example a design of school having 12 classes can used for other 12
classes school.
As project design can be made in different designing and modeling software, although
some technical specification can be entered to the system in the design component.
Similarly the model (map) of the building should also be uploaded to the system as pdf
(or other format) file. Later on, this uploaded map and specification files can be easily
sent by the system to the procurement process for the tender announcement.

BoQ and Cost Estimation Systems:
Thebill of quantities should be created as per the prepared designs. This step should
include the list of different activities (processes) of the project as well all the required
materials in digits with their prices. Moreover, every activity or material should be linked
with its technical specification defined in the technical design stage. Similarly, BoQ
should clearly define the unit cost as well total cost of a single activity (which can be
measured by the respective unit, e.g. square meter, cube meter and so on) or construction
material. Similar to BoQ, a unit rate analysis system has to created within this mode in
order to be responsive to need of ISD and upgradable to the provincial market prices for
construction materials.
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The MIS system should have forms for BoQ to store the BoQ of the above mentioned
activities and constructions materials. Similarly, the system should be able to generate the
BoQ reports of the project for sending it to the procurement department.

Scheduling:
It is obvious that every task must be accomplished in a scheduled time manner:
construction activities also need to be performed in a timeline. In this phase of the project
the timeline for the activities should be defined. All the activities that specified in the
BoQ should have specific time span. The user shall be allowed to see the project schedule
in various forms such Gantt chart, network logic diagram, and show the critical path of
the projects using critical path method (CPM).
The system should implement this feature and should be able to define and link the
activity with the timeline. As a plus point, it should be able to generate and issue a
notification if the activity is completed and when the time span is finished and the
activity is still running. However, all these notification should be based on tracking
component (M&E) which is coming later.

Procurement Status:
After completing the above phases, the project should be ready for the procurement. All
information including BoQ, timeline, technical details and other documents should be in
the procurement documents. These documents should be generated by the system and
should be sent automatically to the procurement department.
As already mentioned that technical details should be uploaded to the system as pdf (or
other formats) files, though, all these technical documents should also be sent with
procurement documents as the attachments. It should include the land approval
documents, maps, technical specifications, BoQ and others. Beyond these things, the
donor of the project should also be specified in the procurement forms. The tender
number and project code should be discussed with procurement department if they are
not assigning it then these numbers should also be assigned in the procurement forms.
ISD should be able to track the procurement process of the projects and its corresponding
details.
 Contract details:
Selecting the Construction Company and contract approval is out of the scope of ISD,
and it is the responsibility of the procurement department to accomplish these tasks.
However, ISD needed to have contract details in their system. The system should store all
relevant data of the contract including the company data such as, company profile, etc.
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All this information should be taken from the procurement department manually or it
should be fetched automatically from their system.

Work start permission:
After signing the contract, the work start permission and other relevant data should also
be entered to the system. The work start permission might include, work start date,
duration and some other rules and policies.The system should computerize the paper
based work start permission document.
Creating M&E system and deviation tracker: The ISDMIS system should include the
cost/scheduled control selection criteria or and earned value methods in order to monitor
the project scheduled and cost aspects. The system should have included all the required
indicators (Scheduled performance indexes, cost performance indexes) in order to
monitor the health of the project. The M&E dashboard should provide the current status
of the all projects and notifications in line with the deadline of the project. Every activity
has to be compared with the BoQ with in a time duration and the its report have to be
entered in the system. Similarly, a predefined schedule of activities progress should be
defined, which will indicate the completion percentage of every single task as well the
percentage of the whole project. The system should be able to upload the standard M&E
reports including pictures provide by site engineers.The M&E system should have a sub
module for deviation tracker on the bases of which the deviation in terms of noncomplains with technical design specification are to be reported and the corresponding
actions to be recorded.

Request for payment:
In line with project physical and financial status the system should timely generate
request for payments and do the calculations. The details of each interim bill processed
for payment should be entered in the system with relevant certifications by different
engineers.
It should be possible to enter quantities mentioned in the interim bill;
cumulative quantities executed so far; and review the balance quantities left from the
estimated quantities for project monitoring. The records of the payments and relevant
calculations, numbers should store in the system to be used for the final payment reports
as well for the long term.

Handover:
The final phase of the project is the handover. In this phase the final survey should take
place and everythingshould verify as it was in the map and in the technical specifications.
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The MIS system should be able to record handover process. In this system this process
can be realize as a checklist of activities and materials that should be verified with real
buildings.
Finally, the handover module should be able to generate a final report of the whole
project including its verification survey and to produce a completion letter to be signed
by both parties.

Archive and registration
A digital archive system need be created for both design and planning sections of the ISD
to enable the user to store and analyze all relevant documents into the system and
generate a final customized report of individual or multiple projects.
Note:
As some of the school projects might be off budget and they could be constructed by
foreign NGOs or other organization, therefore, these projects also need to be stored in the
systems. Accordingly, the system should be able to differentiate between off budget and
on budget projects.

Deliverables (According to the needs of the end user):
o Refined business process model

o Development and deployment of the system to ensure the functionality of the
system for the below components:
1. Need Assessment
2. Formulation and Appraisal
3. Technical Survey
4. Technical Design
5. BoQ and Cost Estimation System
6. Scheduling
7. Procurement Status
8. Contract Details
9. Work Start Permission
10. M&E system and deviation tracker
11. Request for Payment
12. Handover
13. Archive and registration
Training of the ISD staff to use the system.
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



Warranty maintenance of the Implemented system for a period of 1 year post
implementation.
Post Warranty support under an Annual Maintenance Plan.(Negotiated between the
two parties)
User Manuals
o End-user manual
Deliverables (according to the phases of the software development project)
o Detailed project plan (MS Project) with milestones, activities and tasks,
o Progress and payment milestones
o Risk Register and Issues Log
o Scope Document
o High Level Design
o Functional and Non-Functional Specifications in Detail
o Testing (includes test scripts and documentation of results)
1. System Test
2. Systems Integration Test
3. Non-Functional (Performance) Test
4. User Acceptance Test
o System Go Live from Production Servers at the MoE Data Centre.
o Migration and entry of data.
o Technical support manual (includes documentation of source code for support,
maintenance and enhancement)
o All source code, documentation and deliverables are to be transferred to EMIS
upon completion and full ownership rights assigned to EMIS/ISD
4. The Terms of Reference
The Terms of Reference is for a solution provider company to provide the following
services:



Project management of the software development project providing weekly progress
updates by way of face-to-face meetings, phone calls and progress reports.
Development and Implementation of a robust ISD Management Information System
through the MoE Data Centre using the .Net framework 4.0 or above. This should enable
effective management of the construction activities in the Ministry as brought out above
in this document.
Deployment of the developed system in a production as well as test environment at the
MoE data centre.
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
.NET web development services and in-depth and proven extensive knowledge of
software development over the web based on the following technologies
o Technology should be used according to EMIS approved Technologies.
5. Proposal must include the following

Scope of work statement






Description of n-tier application architecture
Description of your software development methodology (SDLC, RAD, etc)
Detailed project plan with relevant progress and payment milestones
Risks and Issues
Resource plan
Deliverables, specify in which phase of the project and must be aligned to payment
milestones
Track Record
Financial Viability (for public companies, your audited financial statements (balance
sheet, income statement) for past 3 years; for private companies, your yearly financial
filings to Company House for past 3 years
References (please provide 3 reference client sites of similar project size, complexity
and technology;
A detailed cost for all required and optional components of the solution
Identify all additional expenses required to complete implementation that are not
shown in the above costs





6. Deliverables and Timeline
Sr. No.
Deliverable
1.
Inception Report
Consultations and Workshop with stakeholders / Requirements
2.
Elicitation and Business Process Mapping
3.
Selection of Technologies and Architectural Design
Iterative development of ISD system (Design / Implement /
4.
analyze)
5.
Deployment and Acceptance testing
6.
Presentation and Review
7.
Training of ISD Staff on using the system
7. Proposed Team of Experts:
Sr.
Experts
Numbers
No.
Project Manager
1
1.
2.
Requirement Engineers
Expected Time
of Engagement
40 Weeks
2
6 Weeks
8
Timeline
1 Week
4 Weeks
1 Week
28 Weeks
2 Week
1 Week
3 Weeks
Degree and Experience
University degree with at least
10 years’ experience.
Bachelor degree in computer
Sr.
No.
Experts
Infrastructure and
Engineering Expert
Numbers
Expected Time
of Engagement
1
3.
12 Weeks
4.
Software Developer /
Programmer
4
Database Expert
1
32 Weeks
5.
8 Weeks
Software tester
1
6.
4 Weeks
Degree and Experience
science with 5 years of system
analysis experience
Bachelor degree in civil
Engineering or relevant field
and 5 years of experience in
construction engineering
process flow
Bachelors’ degree in
information systems or
computer science with at least
five years’ experience
Bachelors’ degree in
information systems or
computer science with at least
five years’ experience
Bachelors’ degree in
information systems or
computer science with at least
five years’ experience
8. Payment Schedule
Instalment
Number
Contractors Performance (As per the phases)
Payment
amount
(Percentage)
1
Inception report, providing consulting expectations &
deliverables, outlines component specific proposed
methodology and tools, implementation strategy (including
detailed work plan), and tentative outline for the deliverables.
10%
2
Software Requirement Specification (SRS) and system
design including the requirements for this systems, back end
design and front end interface design
20%
3
Test of the system and pilot installation of the system
40%
4
Deployment and presentation of the system including all the
documentations of Information Systems Development
standards.
30%
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* 5% performance security will be withheld from the final payment till the completion of one year
warranty period (One year starting from deployment/acceptance of the product).
9. Terms

The duration for this task is 10 Months.


No rights are to be assigned to any third parties
No rights accorded to successful company to make references to ISD in any media,
advertisement or proposal without the expressed written authorization of ISD.
Total development duration for vendor: 10 Months.
10. Contact person from client’s side
The client would designate one of its engineers to be the contact person for the consultant. This
person would be responsible to interact with the consultant for administrative and technical
matters on day to day basis; comment / approve the deliverables submitted by the consultant
within the stipulated time; certify consultants bills and ensure timely payment etc..
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