Production Control System (PCS) - An Introduction
Production Control System (PCS) is a comprehensive solution designed for the local government's Agriculture and Livestock Development division to function efficiently and effectively. We are currently deploying PCS through local government hence, is structured with the vision of nationwide management of the production.
Meanwhile, PCS is currently being deployed as an Operation System (OS) for local governments to manage, operate, and control the agriculture extension services in Nepal. PCS enables local government to share digital knowledge with state and federal government, as well as facilitates onboarding public and private vendors to the system. With PCS, any agriculture extension officer situated in local government can perform significantly better support and services.
PCS built-in modules help the local government keep all the local records of farmer and their cultivations, identifying them individually with a unique code, categorizing the farmers, and even automatically producing the QR Code enabled "Farmer Identity Card". PCS also provides a platform to manage all the local administrative services ranging from subsidies management, local weather per-observation, management of the input suppliers, local agro-vets, and local vendors, to the automation of recommendation services.
Hereafter, DWS has divided the agriculture extension services into 3 sectors; production, investment, and distribution. PCS classifies its solution in all those sectors inclusively.
In "Production", PCS provides well-structured entity-based digital agriculture advisory materials compiled by the legal government's research agencies. So, along with linking extension services to national research, PCS is also equipped with analytical tools to perform seed rate calculations, soil health reporting, and fertilizer recommendations.
In "Investment", PCS provides a Business plan. Currently, PCS covers agriculture, mushroom, bee farming, livestock, fish farming, and poultry sectors. Hence, the Monetary Policy for 2022/23 imposes an arrangement to make mandatory insurance to interest subsidies on concessional loans. Keeping this in mind, PCS regulates contextually detectable information regarding insurance. Meanwhile, some functions that simplify the insurance processes are also in the development research pipeline.
Again, PCS enables accessibility to federal and provincial governments that maximized accessibility of the deprived sector. It is worth noting that PCS can generate any number of business plans for free and each less than a minute. This is very interesting that a document that cost NPR 50k on average takes weeks to be developed, and demands enormous engagement, can be developed for free in less than a minute with zero knowledge of economics.
The "Distribution", is our news sector as compared to Production, and Investment. PCS has built-in support to record vendors at the market and the cultivation of the farmers. PCS also facilitates its operator to manage the production based on the customized cluster, able to aggregate the delivery in a specific time, assign delivery responsibility to authorized registered farmer's groups or a cooperative, and provide reports on the fly for further proceedings.
PCS has a beta module (Market Price Information System - MPIS) to opt-in that helps the operator broadcast the commodity price regularly that is accessible online via mobile or a PC. We are also working on a federal project that feeds PCS in real-time from 12 wholesale markets regularly. Again, PCS has (Marketplace Management System - MPMS) to opt-in which helps the local government to intervene softly strengthening trade between buyer and producer.
Moreover, we have a couple of in-the-lab projects that leverage the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model to support distribution. Since it is an external project supplementing PCS and vice-versa, they are discussed in its independent section respectively.
In summary,
Production Control System (PCS) is a tool that combines the advantages of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) to improve efficiency and effectiveness in operation management. It is being introduced to the Local Government of Nepal as an inter-governmental coordination tool, being developed as an API-based digital infrastructure that provides over 50 tools to empower agriculture extension officers and make government operations efficient, effective, and mainly responsive.
Proceed further only if you still want to learn more tediously informative details about Production Control System (PCS), its development history, deployment strategies, and importantly... its ultimate future plan.
