Bukoba water billing problem solved by UCC Ltd.

BUWASA is an authority that deals with water and sewer supply in Bukoba town in Kagera region with the key functions of provision of water and sewer services. Charges for these services are communicated to customers in bill form.

Problem
Need for the UCC Ltd. water Billing Manager Ver. 3.0 came into being following the drawbacks of the system BUWASA was using.

• It was an old one in the sense that it made use of old technology (developed using Dbase VI and hence ran under DOS environment) and was difficult and slow to operate.
• Presented difficulty in producing reports (including bills which is the most crucial part of the system). Bill information had to be exported to MS Word program and merged with customer details before printing
• Several reports needed to be derived from the billing information but unfortunately were not there
• Presented difficulty in updating information in the system.

Task
UCC Ltds’ task was to install the UCC Billing Manager Ver. 3.0 at the BUWASA offices in order to eliminate most, if not all of the problems above as described in short form.
UCC Ltd. Water billing system allows - Customer registration, meter set up, generation of water bills, record receipts, adjust bills as well as generate reports.

Result: Water billing system.
The result was that the software installation, training and testing of the basic parts of the system (i.e. Bill processing and printing) was done and therefore made it possible to produce customer bills and to print reports which were missing in the old system.




Local Government Planning and Reporting Database

The President’s Office Regional Administration and Local Government is the central Government authority overseeing all Local Governments in Tanzania.

Problem and Task
Need for a tool which would allow Local Governments to formulate full Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) plans and budgets and monitor their expenditure and implementation. UCC’s task was design a comprehensive database tool for use by Local Governments across the country.

Result: PlanRep
The PlanRep system is a comprehensive planning and reporting system which deals with information such as MTEF plans, revenue forecasting, allocation of funds to different categories of expenditure, linking of plans to indicators for monitoring purposes and actual expenditure data. It allows for manual entry of actual expenditures or for importing of expenditure from other systems. It is highly user-friendly. It produces a wide variety of printouts and reports for monitoring and reporting purposes. In addition it is bi-lingual with a facility to easily switch all aspects of the system beween Kiswahili and English. The PlanRep macro version is a tool which allows PORALG to aggregate the plans and expenditures nationally for analysis purposes and drill down to view the data in various breakdowns.

UCC has also coordinated the roll-out of PlanRep to all Local Governments which involves training, ongoing support and follow-up.