Development of management information system on social compliance in RMG sector using open source system architecture

Abstract

In addition to price and quality of the product, and delivery period, all major garment buyers, nowaday, have set their business policies focusing on compliance of factories with their corporate code of conduct. Hence, social compliance of Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories is very crucial for ensuring the export of their products in the developed countries. A Management Information System (MIS) can function significantly in doing a social compliance audit of garment factories and can be used for information storage, handling, processing and retrieval of data for improving the services provided by any organization. The MIS will also facilitate quick decision making for overall functional improvement. To establish a structured system for reporting and monitoring of social compliance status of RMG factories through a standard, logical and comprehensive flow of information a MIS has been developed under this project. The MIS has been assisting different organizations carrying out social compliance audit of RMG factories. The system has been implemented in open source environment using Java and MySQL. The MIS has been designed with a front-end application and backend database system. The design of forms and self descriptive front-end panel with appropriate captioning ensures the user friendliness of the system. The system has been tested based on the data and information collected from organizations who are involved in assessing the social compliance of RMG factories. First of all some adequacy criteria such as grading of factories on different headings based on available input data have been chosen. The execution-based, more specifically, the specification-based techniques used for testing, focuses on the functional and non-functional requirements of the software. Test cases are black-box tests which have been created without knowledge of the software's source code. Based on the execution result of the test cases the software has been fine tuned for bugs and errors. The MIS provides status of factories on fifteen major areas and the outputs are helpful to the management for quick and scientific decision-making and improving the services to achieve the required standard.