Design and development of school assets management system

This paper presents the design and development of a web enabled system supporting materials flows and relevant management processes in educational settings. Unlike other organizational settings, where warehouses are organized with specific input and output procedures, in educational environments (at least, in Cyprus) resources are allocated in various locations (offices, warehouses, laboratories, gym rooms); they are not uniquely defined, and most of the time, the monitoring of their usage or consumption are ad hoc. These conditions create challenges and inefficiencies. The proposed system supports standardized handling of the resources in educational settings and structured management of assets and consumables. It consists of an application running on handheld/smartphone that supports record keeping of school materials. Moreover, receipt of goods from suppliers, loan/return of items and consumption/disposal of materials can be recorded. They system also has a server based back-end module and a central database repository. Pilot testing of the developed prototype took place in five primary schools in Cyprus and assessments have led to positive comments and recommendations for further improvements. The evaluation of the system was completed by the Web enabled tools checking for aspects of usability, efficiency and accessibility resulting to above the average rankings.