Automation of SACCOs - FSD Kenya

The fact that the individual lists overlapped supported the assumption that
a fairly comprehensive listing of solutions available in the market could be
compiled following the chosen approach. All likely solutions taken from these
sources were subject to an initial screening. That way the project team could
decrease the possibility of including a vendor in the process that did not meet
minimum requirements. The proposed solutions needed to offer FOSA, BOSA,
and accounting functionality as well as display a proven implementation track
record at East African SACCOs or MFIs. Information was taken from previous
studies, software reviews, and the vendors’ websites. In cases of doubt, a
vendor was still included to lower the risk that a potentially viable solution
was left out.
The selected vendors were sent an invitation to participate in the SACCO
Automation project in the form of a request for information. To obtain the
vendors’ buy-in, contact was established and the project was explained before
the documents were sent.
2.2.2 rFI process
The objective of the RFI was to get a more detailed view on which solutions
are currently available in the market and how these could meet operational
as well as regulatory requirements. Based on the responses, the project team
would finally short-list the vendors for the final round of in-depth screening.
The RFI document included an executive summary of the SACCO Automation
project as well as an instruction on how to respond to the RFI. Vendors were
requested to complete an attached survey and answer a number of openended
questions within a term of two weeks.
The survey consisted of approximately 120 questions concerning the
functionality and features of a system. The questions had been based on the
requirement categories defined earlier. Vendors had to state if their solution
could meet specific functional requirements with regard to FOSA, BOSA,
Accounting, Finance, and Risk management. Moreover, they were asked to
provide details for the technical requirement categories of Application, Data,
Security and Control, Environment, and Documentation and Support. Finally,
they had to produce their minimum licence cost. Most of the survey questions
were closed questions that had to be answered with either yes or no. A column
was provided for information vendors who wanted to add comments and for
open questions which demanded a value, number or comment. 2
Additionally, the vendors were requested to answer 12 open-ended questions.
The purpose of these questions was to complement the survey questions in
providing a detailed picture of both the vendor and the proposed solution.
Vendors were asked to provide information on their company profile, their
implementation experience, and specific properties of their solution. They had
2 See Annex 3 for FSD Kenya SACCO Automation Vendor Survey v0.2.xls
AUTOMATION OF SACCOS: ASSESSMENT OF POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS • 7
to explain their pricing approach and provide details with regard to support
and maintenance services they offer. 3
The responses submitted by the vendors were then scored to compare the
proposed solutions. To compute a total score for a particular solution, both the
survey answers and the answers to the open-ended questions were scored.
This combination of quantitative and qualitative assessment was considered a
comprehensive approach to evaluating the RFI responses.
For scoring the survey questions, each question had been assigned a priority
from
1 – “The requirement is beneficial to a SACCO, but irrelevant in terms of
fulfilling immediate objectives” to
5 – “The requirement is used to perform tasks fundamental to SACCO
operations”.
This facilitated weighting of the questions as not all requirements were
considered equally important. A vendor could score from 0 to 5 points in each
of the approximately 120 questions. In case the proposed solution did not
fulfil the requirement, i.e. the vendor answered no or provided an insufficient
answer, 0 points were given for the respective question. In case a solution could
meet the requirement, a vendor was awarded 1 point for fulfilment which was
multiplied with the assigned priority (1 to 5). The maximum possible survey
score amounted to 464 points.
Out of 12 open-ended questions 10 were scored, as the schematic illustrating
the solution’s architecture and the cost estimate were provided for the project
team’s reference and not subject to scoring. The remaining 10 questions were
all regarded equally important, hence they were not assigned a particular
priority. The vendors’ answers were evaluated with regard to fulfilment level
and points were awarded accordingly. Vendors could score between 1 and 5
points according to the fulfilment levels in table 1.
The maximum possible score for the open-ended questions amounted to 50.
Once the scores for both parts of the RFI response had been calculated, they
were weighted to obtain a final score. A vendor’s relative score for the survey
(i.e. what percentage of requirements the proposed solution could fulfil) was
weighted 65%, the relative score for the answers to the open-ended questions
was weighted 35% of the final score. A ranking of all solutions was finally
produced based on the total score.
3 See Annex 4 for open-ended questions