Designing A Hospital Inventory Management System
[A CASE STUDY OF UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN HEALTH SERVICES (JAJA CLINIC)]

CHAPTER THREE SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN
3.1    ANALYSIS OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM
This involves the entire operation of the hospital management, the procedure by which the system operates as well as the benefits and weaknesses associated with the existing system; when the patient (student/staff) gets to the Hospital waiting room, he/she writes down his/her name on the waiting list. While waiting, the patient’s file is being searched for in the file room where all patients’ files are kept. If the patient is registered and his/her file is found in the file room, he/she is directed to the available doctor to be checked. If the patient is not registered yet in the Hospital, he/she has to be registered manually before a Doctor can attend to the patient. After the patient has been checked by the Doctor, the Doctor issues a drug prescription slip to the patient to be taken to the pharmacist. At the pharmacist section, the patient drops the prescription slip issued at the Doctor’s office in a box at the pharmacist section; the pharmacist takes the slips and manually checks for the availability of the drug (s), if the drug is available, the pharmacist issues the drug, if the drug is not available, the pharmacist returns the prescription slip to the patient for him/her to find other sources to get the drug.
This helps in the design of the new system; the weaknesses of the existing system in terms of no proper record of drugs issued and a database for students registered are discarded while the strengths and positives are retained in the new system. In order to convert the manual system on inventory control in Jaja clinic into computer based system, it is inventible not to review thoroughly the manual system with a view of getting the general outline of the system, all the operations involved in this system, and analyze the possible constraint encountered during these process, the method of data collection employed, review of the procedure and processes involved in the various operation involved in the system, then propose a new and better (computer-based) system and finally highlights the over view of this new (proposed) system.
3.2    PROBLEMS OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM
The current system is characterized by a lot of drawbacks, since processing is undertaken by humans who are prone to making errors caused by using the manual system, the pharmacist have the problem of inefficiency, a lot of paper work has to be done irrespective of this, it takes a long period of time to accomplish proper drugs dispensing for patients. The manual systems (existing system) are faced by numerous difficulties. They include:-
i.    The discrepancies between record and stock taking due to bad writing and figures copied wrongly.
ii.    The method of drugs dispensing, re-ordering stocking takes a longer time for the facts that all the processing need a statistical and computational manner of calculating.
iii.        Retrieval and updating; these are also a big problem to the existing system in order to retrieve or update a single file of a patient requires going through entire file stored in the cabinet filling paper room.
iv.    Records are easily misplaced or destroyed because of lack of proper record keeping.
3.2    REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS OF THE NEW SYSTEM Functional requirements of the new system
They include:
i.    The system must provide accurate data for efficient stock taking.
ii.    The system must be easy to operate.
iii.    The system must preserve data integrity.
iv.    The system must operate in real time.