AIMS, GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE MIS AND OF THE MIS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM

AIMS

To improve the management information system which provides information to cattle buyers, cattle sellers, researchers, and the Ministry of Agriculture; the objective of this information provision is to help create a cattle business in Tanzania with higher turnover and higher profitability; and also to help provide the consumer with more better quality beef at a lower price; also if possible to encourage a live cattle or fresh, frozen, canned or otherwise preserved beef export business.

GOALS

1. To maximise information usefulness in terms of accuracy, timeliness

and relevance.

2. To minimise the amount of field and desk work required to

produce this accurate, timely and relevant information.

3. To present information in a format or formats most useful to

buyers, sellers and researchers.

4. To enable the production of this information by privatised

organisations.

OBJECTIVES of Current MIS Study

1. To present historical information for the 3 major cattle markets in ways to show time trends and seasonal fluctuations in price, grade, weight, age, sex distribution, etc.. To analyse these trends and fluctuations so as to advise export and domestic buyers and domestic sellers as to how to improve their business; to find good production trends and to learn from smart producers with a viewpoint of educating other non-improving producers; to find bad trends and to try to counter these.

2. To examine the 2 existing computer processing systems and if necessary to create a 3rd new computer system to supplant the existing 2 systems. If so, to port over or translate the information in the 2 existing systems to enable future historical analysis of a combination of pre-October 94 and post-October 94 data.

3. To examine the methodologies used so far by the 2 systems to analyse the data. If these appear inadequate, to examine the data and to come up with a new methodology which is superior to the previous and which appears capable of handling present and future types of data; the prime aim of the methodology should be to produce sufficiently accurate information with the minimum of sample size; it will probably utilise averaging or best-fit techniques, and may have provision to identify and discard bad data points.