Exhibition of Software Solutions by the 2009 graduating class of the M.Sc. Computer Based Management Information Systems held at Mona Visitors’ Lodge, Jamaica.

Software Solutions on Exhibition:

• Flood Hazard Management
• Online Training Management
• Customs Underinvoicing Business Intelligence
• Media Target Marketing
• Delay Forecasting
• Court Scheduling
• Student Performance Analysis
• Endowment Management Information System
• Pharmaceutical Marketing
• Student Performance Assessment
• Business Intelligence for Airline Maintenance
• Environmental Solutions
• Claims Payout Decision Support System
• Integrated Customer Management System
• Debt Recovery
• Employee Performance Prediction

For further details, email: msc.cbmis@uwimona.edu.jm

Project Summaries

CUBIS

Problem Definition
Under-invoicing is an ongoing problem that continues to plague Customs Departments in the Caribbean and the world at large. As a result of this problem, countries continue to lose much needed revenue from the duties and fees charged for importing goods into a country. In 2008, Jamaica’s estimated revenue loss was estimated to be approximately J$13 billion in just one port . Additionally, it is believed that the lack of accountability has contributed to the proliferation of corruption in Customs Departments in the region.

Solution
The Customs Business Intelligence System, CUBIS, will perform risk analysis for import entries submitted to the Customs Department, clearly indicating the risk level and estimated revenue loss per entry to Customs personnel. An external data mining process will be used to develop and update importer risk profiles. Price comparisons with similar and identical goods, in addition to seasonal patterns for under-invoicing will be combined with these importer profiles to form the overall risk evaluation criteria for each entry. Entries will be examined individually as well as cumulatively to produce an Investigations List, detailing the suspected occurrences of under-invoicing and the estimated revenue loss per importer. This allows for a more efficient and target approach to resource allocation for conducting investigations at the Customs Department.

Target market
The Primary Target Market will consist of Customs Departments across CARICOM as the electronic C87 form is currently in use by all states, indicating the availability of data for mining and risk analysis. The wider Caribbean community will be the Secondary Market, after which the product will be marketed to other international regions.
 
Group Members
Kissan Brown
Sandy Shaw
Roberto Diaz
Andrew Davis

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Claims Payout Decision Support System

Problem Definition
The basic purpose of insurance is to anticipate catastrophic losses that could financially impair your future. An insurance claim is the request of the policy holder or any stated beneficiary from the insurance issuing company for financial reimbursement. Circumstances requiring a payout may include the death of the insured, the dismemberment of the insured or the diagnosis of the insured with a critical illness that is covered under the policy contract. In order to guard against fraud and to ensure that payouts are done in accordance with the law and the requirements stipulated by the policy contract a claims committee is set up to review all cases involving misrepresentation/non-disclosure regardless of the circumstances surrounding the death of the insured. In addition to this, non-natural deaths such as homicides, motor and personal accidents are referred to the claims committee as the circumstances surrounding the death or dismemberment of the insured has to be examined.

The make up of this committee includes the following highly functional expert areas: The Actuary (Chairperson), The Company’s Attorneys, Marketing and Sales Vice Presidents, The Head of the Underwriting Department, The Head of Insurance Operations, The Chief Medical Officer and The Head of Claims Unit with the President of the company being the final arbiter for cases that cannot be resolved at the committee level. The high-level nature of the members of the claims committee makes it difficult for them to meet as often as needed or as long as is required to meet given other competing priorities of the committee members.

Given the major time constraints and other competing priorities, the Committee members are faced with the challenge of analysing the relevant documents that contain the facts for a particular case then and deciding whether or not to approve a claim based on the facts of the case, the statutes of the policy contract and the observance of law. As a result of this, the turnaround time to settle claims often fall outside the agreed service standards.
 
Solution
The Claims Payout Decision Support System© (CPDSS) is the solution for the issues highlighted earlier. This web-enabled system is implemented on a three-tier client server architecture that comprises of a transaction processing, text analysis and an expert system component. CPDSS will use the facts of a the case (Death certificate, Medical records, Health insurance records, Police report, Coroners report, etc) to form data sets that will be analyzed by the text analyzer. The keywords outputted from the text analyzer will be used as input for the inference engine that was built using CLIPS. These keywords are then processed using rules that were derived from data mining and confirmed by the industry experts.

Our prototype will focus on the decisions surrounding claims that go to Claims Committee and make recommendations to the Claims Manager on whether to either pay the sum insured only or both the sum insured and the accidental death and dismemberment portion or pay a refund or deny both the sum insured and the accidental death and dismemberment portion.

Target market
Our product is unique and thus calls for a niche marketing approach whereby, our product will initially deployed to life insurance companies with a focus on claims and then to the General Insurance . 

Group Members
Kirk Morris
Christopher Pinnock
Nadine Simms
Claudine West

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FLAMS – The next generation of flood hazard management

Problem Definition
Over the years flooding has being one of the most disastrous forces of nature and as such requires the most technological solutions to assist in reducing its impact. The current community operated flood warning systems with manual gauges and volunteer readers are inefficient and inadequate, coupled with the delayed and dependent relay of information between the Meteorological Office of Jamaica and Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management. (ODPEM). As such currently there is a lack of an integrated system to predict the occurrence and extent of riverine flooding with sufficient warning time to prevent loss of lives, livestock and property and initiate information driven emergency management efforts to minimize the likely impact in the flooded area(s). As well as, important hydrologic & meteorological data for water resources monitoring, planning, design and overall river management being inaccessible sometimes, costly to retrieve, unavailable and in some cases non-existent due to loss. Synonymous with the above, the government is facing increasing costs associated with flood loss amounting in millions of dollars. There is therefore an urgent need to reduce this cost burden.

Solution
The current efforts being carried out in the flood management domain needs to be significantly enhanced and our Decision Support System (“F.L.A.M.S”) will attempt to assist in this area.
Our solution is made up of three (3) modules it consists of a flood alert module, hydrolic and meteorological information module and a risk hazard analysis module.

FLAMS will seek to provide a real time five (5) hour riverine flood alert module to enable adequate warning time for a flood event, and assist with emergency management decisions to be made before and during the event. It will also provide real time access to and storage of meteorological and hydrological resources with river management decision making information. Therefore reducing the inconvenience and cost associated with retrieving and losing valuable data. FLAMS will also provide post and real time flood damage and vulnerability estimation for risk management and hazard mitigation planning. The system will assist in determining the extent of damage and areas that will be impacted, so as to enable long-term flood control planning, emergency management, land use planning and management and provide cost benefit analysis of mitigation methods/efforts.  It will also provide an interactive composite hazard map aimed at planners and developers for multipurpose general use. The prototype to be demonstrated will focus on riverine flooding using the Rio Minho River and watershed in Clarendon.

Target market
B3A Limited’s target market will be the Government of Jamaica; however, the users of the system will be Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), Water Resources Authority (WRA) and the Meteorological Services of Jamaica (MSJ) as well as Regional Governments and their essential service agencies.

Group Members
Everol Anderson
Petrona Anderson
Alexander Antoine
Andrew Bulgin

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Integrated Customer Management System (iCMS)

Problem Definition
There has been a significant increase in the cost of keeping existing customers and quadrupling cost of acquiring new customers in the Jamaican telecommunications market due to global competition. Approximately 85% of Jamaican mobile subscribers are pre-paid and as a result there is little or no demographic information on these customers. Therefore it is extremely difficult for the mobile telecommunication companies to profile and monitor these customers. Customer attrition or churn is another major problem as it results in a considerable reduction in revenues and profits. Mobile providers are currently unable to identify or predict which customers are likely to leave (churn) before they actually churn and therefore providers can only take reactive action. Companies continue to spend millions of dollars on mass market campaigns to reduce churn, retain more customers, and increase customer spending. However, companies are unable to track the effectiveness of the implementation of these campaigns to see if they are worth the financial investment. Additionally, key performance indicators are monitored daily using spreadsheets and as such decision making is largely reactive.

Solution
Integrated Customer Management System (iCMS) is a tri-faceted customer management system which comprises customer management, churn management and campaign management components. Data-mining techniques are performed to discover customer behavioural patterns (profiles/rules). These rules are coded into the system as SQL queries and are used to classify customers as high spenders, low spenders or churners. The system will predict which and how many customers are likely to churn. The system will also allow for the input of customized market campaigns for each customer group. It will indicate the need for a campaign by  using an alert, this alert will be based on comparison of the set target  against forecasted and actual figures.Once a campaign is launched, the system will start tracking the effectiveness of the campaign until the end of the campaign period.  iCMS will allow mobile telecommunication companies to better target their various marketing and customer retention programs at the appropriate customer segment. As such, companies will realize greater returns on their marketing and public relations dollars. The system will also track and display the real-time trends of key performance indicators on a dashboard which will be used for proactive strategic decision-making .The system assists in the reduction of customer attrition (churn), increase revenues and the reduction of customer acquisition/retention cost.

Target Market
Our target market includes the telecommunications and cable entertainment markets, as well as the financial industry throughout the Caribbean. Our initial focus will be on the Jamaican mobile telecommunication market which consists of:
•    Digicel with approximately 2 million subscribers
•    LIME (formerly Cable and Wireless Jamaica) with approximately 660,00 subscribers
•    Claro, newcomer with approximately 250,000 subscribers


Group Members
Erica Thomas
Michelle McKenzie
Susanna O’Sullivan
Yanique Peynado

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High Performance Prediction System (HEPPS)

Problem Definition
Many companies today operate a customer contact centre to facilitate a central point where customers’ queries are handled.  The management of companies with contact center operations continues to be faced with the challenge of providing quality services on a consistent basis to their customers.  This challenge often results from the difficulty in finding suitable employees for the job.  The inability to adequately identify the characteristics of potential employees who may be compatible to work in the contact centre is one major reason for failure of providing quality services.
A recent report showed that 71% of Contact Centers have difficulty attracting and retaining quality people and company’s spend an average of US$4 000 to US$7 000 on training employees . Staff turnover is very costly, considering the time and money spent on constant recruitment and training as well as lost productivity. Research has shown that in most cases, high staff attrition stems from the recruitment method used.

Overview of Business Solution

High Performance Prediction System (HEPPS) is a recruitment and performance management decision support system.  The system is designed to help recruiters identify the most suitable candidates for particular job positions.  The system will provide an analysis of employees’ performance, demographic data and personality characteristics to assess trends and patterns and make a prediction of the percentage chance of an applicant doing well in a particular line of business (LOB).

Through the use of data mining on a company’s historical data the system identifies characteristics of potential employees who are likely to be high or low performers. The aim is to highlight those characteristics common among employees who are performing below or above a company’s standard. 

HEPPS is intended to help managers in the recruitment process in capturing quality employees, and placing them in LOB or areas they are likely to perform well in. Thus, reducing the likelihood of poor performance in LOB as a result of candidates being placed in areas they are not suited for, which is likely to lead to dissatisfaction, poor performance and high employee turnover.
 

Target Market
Initially we plan to target medium to large contact center companies in Jamaica within the first five years of operations. We plan to expand our business to other companies with contact center operations in the Caribbean, after five years. In the future we plan to target other companies apart from contact centers.

Group Members:
Natalee Nembhard
Carlene Williams
Karlington Williams
Marc Pryce

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Debt recovery pro

Managing collections cost-effectively has never been more critical than in today's economy. The businesses which are going to survive and succeed during this recessionary storm need to focus on maintaining portfolio quality by keeping cash flow steady. Today, many of the credit and collections departments are using aging-based collection strategies to manage and prioritize internal collection activity. Based on industry analysis, using only the aging method to prioritize collection activities can often result in the wrong treatment being applied to the wrong customer at the wrong time.

Research has showed that there are more effective models which can be used to monitor an existing customer's risk to become severely delinquent or written off for proactive decision making. In this economic environment, no company has enough collection resources, hence it is more important than ever to have your collectors apply the appropriate collection strategy, based upon collection risk that is validated with statistical science.

While debt collection agencies are able to provide effective ways of finding customers and contacting them using IVR, automatic redial and show customer information and status, they are not geared towards categorizing these customers already in default and recommend solutions for persons to handle and target persons who are most likely to pay.

The proposed solution will give management along with credit officers within companies in different lines of business the ability to make more proactive decisions regarding collections. The typical collection systems rely heavily on aging of delinquent Accounts as the basis of collection. However, the proposed system will  leverage on its sophisticated Scoring & Profiling approach to ascertain the Relationship Value of each Account and Customer before deciding treatments, work lists generation and assignment processes.

The system will handle a flow of accounts through a reengineered collections process that implements a dynamic collection strategy in an automated scoring node. All past due accounts are scored while, at the same time, allowing exception rules that route certain special accounts to a manual collection review. An example of an exception rule would be one that selects out national accounts with large sales volumes that may require special manual attention and handling due to the large revenue opportunity they represent.

Group Members:
Tameka Gray
Fadeen Garricks
Dave Reid
Gregory Tomlinson

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Court Case Scheduling

Problem Definition
The courts in Jamaica are faced with the issue of cases not being disposed in an efficient manner.    Statistics show that because of the heavy caseloads some courts have as little as only 18% of its cases being disposed in one year.  The situation result in courts being inefficient in their day to day operations.
In light of the backlog, many initiatives have been taken by the Ministry in an aim to reduce the number of cases not resolved.  Urgent cases are put off for further hearing, resulting in serious effects.
Solution

FACS Technologies, formed by its four members, aims to develop a system that will give intelligent suggestions about how to schedule different cases based on certain factors about a particular case.  This proposal was put forward after exhaustive reviews of the problem space and the proposed solution by the JJSR.  This is achieved by using an expert system that takes as input all the necessary factors and resources available and suggests an optimal solution in the form of a schedule. The project is aimed at helping to significantly reduce the persistent backlog in the Jamaica Court System.
We were able to develop the solution to suit the organization’s needs and objectives by way of several interviews with management and staff at the Jamaica Justice System.  Objectives were used to create functional as well as system requirements which was later translated into a system that was suitable to everyone.
The prototype has been demonstrated to persons at the courts as well as the department of Management Information System of the Jamaica Justice System.  This simulation illustrated the behaviour of the system at various levels and assisted us in refining the system based on the requirements of the department.

Target market
The Ministry of Justice in Jamaica has the responsibility of ensuring an efficient and effective Judicial System and thus has mandated its improvement. The Ministry has continually sought to enact policies and sanction projects geared towards the improvement of the Judicial System. In their June 2007 report titled “The Jamaica Justice System Reform Project (JJSR)”, several recommendations were made that were all geared towards the improvement of the Judicial System, therefore, our target market is the Judiciary of the Jamaica Justice System, in particular the courts. 

Group Members:
Anthony Gidigah                
Francis Vassel
Carlton Johnson                
Sophia Mellard

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Online Training Management System

Problem Definition
A detailed study of current systems revealed that companies seeking to identify training institutions to provide training for their staff and who want to pursue a course or degree in keeping with their need for self development face the challenge of identifying a training institution that will optimally fulfill their training needs. The current practice is to select the most familiar training institution or the training institution that has provided training previously.

Training institutions are also faced with the challenge of identifying the companies that require their staff to be trained and the specific areas. The conventional approach is mass marketing where a schedule of upcoming courses is submitted to the companies and the companies respond based on their needs. In addition, training courses are first packaged. This approach gives little or no competitive advantage.

Solution
Online Resource Training Management System (OR-TMS), a web-based management information system, offers a single point where companies, individuals and training institutions have direct access to each other and therefore will be able to make effective decisions.  It provides companies as well as individuals more efficient access to training institutions offering their desired courses and professions based on schedule, cost and location. OR-TMS also gives training institutions direct access to companies that require training and provides a more efficient way for these institutions to acquire trainees and schedule courses. The system also provides information to the training institutions on the demand for a course or profession by analyzing the log of searches performed, allowing for more efficient planning and scheduling of courses.

Target Market
Our target market is training institutions within the Jamaican market initially, 60 percent (60%) of the companies located in the corporate areas and graduates of secondary institutions that seek further development through education and training within the 20 – 64 age group.

Group Members
Kisha Gaye Anderson
Karleen Bascoe
Carlinton Burrell
Deon Robinson

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PharmAssist

Problem Definition
Pharmaceutical companies operate in a very competitive environment with many companies marketing similar products to the same doctors. On average, the marketing budget is approximately 20% of a company’s overall budget. Marketing includes the distribution of gifts, conference sponsorships and free samples to doctors and pharmacists. There is however currently no effective way of determining the return on investment as it relates to money spent promoting products to doctors, that is, which drugs and how many of them are being prescribed. The current use of heuristics to determine the most important doctors to a company and those that would be of great potential as well as the blanket approach taken to detailing drugs to doctors hinders the effective allocation of the marketing budget.

The Solution
The solution, PharmAssist©, utilizes data from pharmacy inventory systems to provide Pharmaceutical companies with competitors’ sales and doctors’ prescribing information in order to make informed marketing decisions. PharmAssist© will provide pharmaceutical companies with detailed analysis of doctors prescribing habits and as well as their co-prescribing trends. The analysis provided will assist pharmaceutical companies in customizing their approach to marketing pharmaceutical products as well as measuring the effectiveness of the strategies employed.

Target market
PharmAssist was designed to suit the business needs of local pharmaceutical companies.

Group Members
Nicole Bryan
Kylo Fairclough
Levar Gordon
Patrice McKessey

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Student Performance Assessment System (SPAS) Version 1.0

Problem Definition
With the rise in competition among the academic institutions in Jamaica, the need for more effective management within tertiary institutions has become more imperative. Universities are required to place much greater emphasis on self-study, and on ensuring that they are performing efficiently in all areas, including the areas of student transformation and student retention, which is an area of performance linked, at least in part, to academic results. (Cheesman, Simpson & Wint, 2006).

One well-known tertiary institution in Jamaica has reported a 40% failure rate among its first year Computer Science students. Of this 40%, the majority have either withdrawn from the institution or have transferred to other programmes of study, often times these alternate programmes have lower tuition fees.

High student failure rates are therefore not only damaging to the reputation and overall efficiency of institutions but these rates also contribute to a loss in revenue.

Solution
The Student Performance Assessment System (SPAS) Version 1.0 provides an innovative web hosted service for Tertiary Institutions to predict student performance. This prediction is obtained from extensive data mining and provides sound probability of students passing or failing courses. The system also proactively employs the most appropriate intervention strategies captured from resident domain experts through a customizable decision support system, geared towards achieving efficiency through student retention and transformation. 
 
Target Market
The target market consists of the thirty- two (32) tertiary institutions in Jamaica that are registered with the University Council of Jamaica and currently have computerized student data.

Group Members
Khian McPherson
Allison Pessoa
Patrick Powell
Toni Thomas

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Student Performance Analysis System

Problem Definition
Based on research done, there is a concern about the performance of students in the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) exams. An analysis of CXC results done for the period 2005 – 2008 for specific subjects ascertained that performance in these subjects were consistently low.  This is a major cause for concern for planners and educators alike.  As recent as January 2009, CXC reported that student performance declined resulting in an overall failure rate of 57% compared with 55% in the previous year.
 
Although some of the causes of failure may be attributed to systemic, environmental and social causes, there is still a need for accurate information, on demand, on a per student basis. We have found that administrators within the education sector are reactive rather than proactive given the paper-based system that has predominated. This has led to delays in implementing solutions that could further improve results.

Solution
The Business Intelligence system, Student Performance Analysis System (SPAS), will provide projection data derived from uploaded CXC results and schools’ internal test/environmental data scores. This data will include yearly result trends of past exam performance, forecasts of future CXC results for an existing cohort, and matriculation information based on present results and further studies.  A report will be generated detailing recommendations of possible intervention techniques that can be utilized to improve projected CXC passes based on the test scores uploaded. All information derived from SPAS will be displayed in an easily navigable Graphical User Interface that allows yearly comparison by subject, grade and proficiency.

Access to the system will be gained via secure web-based login.

Target market
SPAS is aimed at educational administrators and planners of syllabi and teaching plans. We have therefore targeted the Ministry of Education, the Caribbean Examinations Council and secondary schools as the market segments that will derive the most benefit from the solution.

Group Members
JodiAnn Morris
Joan Mignott
Priscilla Gordon
Trevor Martin

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Delay Forecasting System (DFS)

The Jamaica Customs Department has found it difficult to meet their projected revenue target of J$80B annually. This failure is significantly influenced by the fact that various events (absence of license, permits, incorrect valuation and tariff codes, etc) occur during the processing of the associated shipping documents which has the effect of inducing delays on the turnaround time for revenue collection. However, the major problem here is not the presence of the events but rather the inability to objectively and accurately determine the amount of time that will be introduced by the combination of events. There is also no system in place that will actively prompt relevant users to take action when very important shipments (high revenue flow attached or items of national interest) are being delayed  because of relatively insignificant errors (missing signature, etc).

Solution
The Delay Forecasting System will first use historical data from the clients operations to establish timelines for the processing of shipments based on the contents of the consignment and the events that are acting on that item. This baseline will be used to assign a timeframe by which similar shipments must be processed and the revenue collected. This will also trigger alerts if the established timelines are exceeded for a select subset of shipments. Additionally, it will also allow them to initiate action and monitor the status of the entry through to revenue collection. There are also a number of tables and graphs which will aid the management team to more efficiently monitor and manage their value chain by highlighting the revenue withheld from month to month due to delays, most problematic events, most problematic tariff categories, broker performance, etc.

Target Market
In the first five years of operation our target market will consists of potential clients in all Custom departments locally and regionally with us providing the requisite training for proper use of the system. The successful implementation of our system in this industry will allow us to pursue other potential markets such as Manufacturing and Service industries.

Group Members
Ikepo Fuller
Ian Johnson
Milton Wright
Orville Elliston

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ourlinkz .com – Endowment Management Information System

Problem Definition
Today’s business world demands that organisations optimize their return on investment through targeted and efficient use of resources for marketing. This is especially true for non-governmental organizations and non-profit organisations, such as schools, churches, hospitals, service organisations, and charities that solicit donations from their supporters and rely on these endowments to undertake their various projects.  Locally and regionally, there are very few endowment management systems employed by these organisations since the cost and resources associated with the deployment and maintenance of such a system is formidable. Further the few endowment systems that do exist, offer very little in terms of psychographic and demographic profiling, achieved through the use of data mining for donor modeling. By their very operations, these organisations find the cost associated with acquiring the data mining software, along with the personnel required to manipulate the advanced statistical and mathematical tools inherent to them, prohibitive. They engage in volume marketing to solicit donations and a non-application of data mining techniques to their donor data and donation history, to optimize their marketing efforts, represents a missed opportunity and a loss of the benefits to be gained through business intelligence.

Business Solution
Ourlinkz is a completely web-based, hosted subscription management information system created by Gr8 Technologies to offer organisations that rely on endowments a platform through which their supporters can feel involved with the organisation while being able to donate to any project for that organisation regardless of location. Ourlinkz brings organizations to their supporters and gives each organisation a web-presence. The system will allow entities to exploit associations, derived through data mining, which will allow them to solicit donations more effectively and thereby improve revenue streams.  The system mines the historical data residing in a relational data base to model donors through the use of clustering to offer effective and targeted soliciting. Targeted soliciting is based on profiling of donors based on output donor retention, campaign, new donor and donor-level models.  Other features of the system include online donor payments, automatic acknowledgement letter  and newsletter generation, ability to segment donors by age , profession, level of donation, frequency of donation and any other demographic required by the entity, reports on donations and trend analysis

Target market
The system is an intuitive completely web-based system with an initial target market consisting of schools and other educational institutions. Thereafter the market will extend to churches, NGO’s, hospitals, charities and other institutions.

Group Members
Paula Gracie
Robert Henry
Marie McKenzie
Kahena Munroe
Carolyn O’Connor

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Media Target Marketing System

Problem Statement

• The placement of ads on television, radio and newspaper in Jamaica is done by vague assumptions.
• Advertising agencies now manipulate and analyze two dimensional media research information by using simple average to determine where to place an advertisement.

Our Solution

• MTMS is a Decision Support System that will use a combination of Pareto Analysis, Geometric Mean, Decision Matrix, Standard Marketing Formulae and media research survey data to make recommendation on which advertising slot is best suited for companies.
• The system will also convert two dimensional data into multi dimensional data.

Marketing

Target Market

• All companies who want to advertise which include: Advertising Agencies, Media Entities, etc.

What marketing strategy will be used?

• The push marketing strategy will be used to increase awareness and influence prospects to buy the system.

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MBI Solutions
 
Problem
Airline maintenance is a costly factor in an air carrier’s budget and can range from US$ 20-30 billions yearly.  It is crucial to streamline maintenance functions to minimize the aircrafts downtime in order to reduce maintenance cost.  MBI Solutions believes that addressing the following problems will help airline carriers to reduce their operational expenses.  They are:

• inability to control the high incidence of unscheduled maintenance resulting in the down time of aircrafts
• inefficiently forecasting, planning and budgeting tool
• inability to identify the sequence for part failure.
• inability to assess station, crew performance and vendor reliability

 
Solutions
Business Intelligence for Aircraft Maintenance (BIAM) is a web based software planning and budgeting tool that integrates data mining technology to detect sequencing of part failure.  MBI Solutions looks at key performance indicators within aircraft maintenance highlighting functions that are underperforming. This solution provides managers with the necessary information allowing them to make management decision which will allow them to reduce their maintenance cost. 

The system uses historical data to obtain sequence of how parts fail on the aircraft, these patterns present and can be used to suggest possibly workflow for maintenance checks.  The company believes that the small improvement in efficiency can have a significant financial impact within the industry and as such give the assurance that BIAM will produce the following outcomes:

• Analyze vendors products for procurement
• Part failure sequence report (system workflows) developed using historical data (data mining).
• Parts forecasting and budgeting
• Staff performance report
• Station performance report

 
Target Market
MBI Solutions will target airline operators within the Caribbean, North and Central America who perform their own maintenance and companies that specialize in aircraft maintenance
 
Group Members
Xavier Patrick
Rochelle Pusie
Carol Palmer
Leandio Spencer

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IEPARS – INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING APPLICATION REVIEW SYSTEM

Problem Definition
All structures that are built in Jamaica that may have an impact on the environment have to secure from National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) or Parish Councils permission to erect it legally. 

The mission of the agency is to ensure that all infrastructures are built within environmental guidelines; therefore the application process is critical to the operations of NEPA. Based on a cabinet decision, it was mandated that the organization improve their internal processes to become more  efficient, applications should be processed within three months and that clients are kept abreast of the status of their applications.

The applications process refers to all the stages in which an applicant, sometimes called a developer, submits his/her application form along with architectural plans and written documents for approval or denial of request. These can either be submitted through the Parish Councils or directly to NEPA.

It was found that the average turnaround time for an application was significantly in excess of the stipulated three (3) months.

The ineffectiveness of the application process  to properly screen, pre-process  and provide adequate and timely information on applications has led to considerable delays which has resulted in  numerous  applications being  accepted that should have been refused or returned, loss  of millions of dollars in investment and frustration and numerous complaints from stakeholders and developers.

Solution
IEPARS  aims at improving the applications submission process, improve efficiency and to reduce overall processing time by offering three modules:

• Pre-checking: to ensure that the application submitted is valid
• Screening : to determine upfront  whether a permit application requires an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
• Application Review:  Deciding upfront whether an application based on location fits or meets relevant required standards.

The system uses utilizes a combination of Geographic Information System (GIS) and an Expert System to analyze client information submitted through the online submission process and geographic data such as density, zoning, road, rivers, hazard areas etc to review applications against established standards and policies.

Target Market
The principal client will be NEPA, the Parish Councils  and Caribbean state Agencies undertaking natural resource management, Environmental Assessment and approval.

Group Members
Melbourne Morgan
Gregory Bennett
Nardia Brown
Donnette Cameron 

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