North West tracks textbooks

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 11 Feb 2008

Kuepper International has been awarded a R250 000 contract by the North West Province education department to supply online tracking software for schoolbooks. MD Mike Shraga says other provinces are also on the cusp of buying the solution.

He says the Web-based software uses bar codes on the books to track them in the school system. It can tell, in real-time, what books are in which departmental warehouse, which have been issued to a particular school or are en route to a designated destination.

The WinFreight software is used in the freight, courier and warehousing industries and can use a variety of databases, including MS Access, Sequel 7, Oracle 9i and Sybase.

The front-end, however, remains the same irrespective of the database used. This, the company says, ensures no retraining is necessary when customers change the back-end.

The education department is in a belated drive to upgrade its IT. SA spends more on education - on a per capita, absolute and percentage of GDP - than many other countries, including most of the developed world. Yet the outcomes remain disappointing, particularly in the fields of literacy, maths and science.

The State IT Agency (SITA) is casting about for proposals for management IT on behalf of the national Department of Education (DOE) to accurately track children in schools and properly manage the country`s Further Education and Training (FET) colleges.

ITWeb late last week reported SITA and the DOE were evaluating industry proposals and costing for two major projects - a business management system, for the FET colleges (tender 614/2007), and integrating two complementary, but disconnected learner management systems (tender 617/2007).

SITA spokesman Elton Fortuin declined to comment on the cost of the projects, saying the "request for bid" process was intended to solicit industry`s ideas for both solutions and costing. However, an industry source involved in one of the two tenders said the price could easily run into the billions.