Sustainable Solutions

There’s lots of companies advertising their resource usage, so we’ll throw our hats in the ring:

• What we do (Sustainable Solutions and Sustainable Networks combined Kathmandu Office)
  • 10 staff
  • Wireless internet for 40 clients,
  • including three gateway machines running Freebsd 24-7 on embedded and full versions including proxy servers and mail servers
• What we use
  • Electricity usage per month: 300 Kwh (Cost: USD60 per month for whole office)
  • Water usage: about 5000 litres per month
  • Heating: all passive. Except for running a gas heater for a hour a week over the winter.
  • Cooling: Just 50W fans
  • Transport: we have 2 motorcycles for office use. Of our 10 staff:
    1. 3 walk to work
    2. 3 use public transport
    3. 3 use motorcycles
    4. 1 uses a bicycle.

How are we doing?
We think we can do better in the following areas

• Look at moving some electricity generation to solar
• Try and minimise air travel to client sites out of Nepal

In 2005 a DFID funded project in Ekiti state of Nigeria installed mSupply software. They were so pleased with the results that in 2007 they decided to install mSupply in six other states as well.
Sustainable Solutions’ staff made a training and installation visit in November 2007.
(And no, it wasn’t a scam, and yes they did pay us ;-) )

As 2007 is half way through, it’s a good time think about the sorts of things we’re doing….

• mSupply continues to be well accepted around the world. We are hard at work on a major enhancement to allow multiple stores in the one mSupply date file. This will be installed at Vaiola Hospital in Tonga in Setpember 2007, and available for general use in late October.
• Several of our new projects involved web applications, and we’re evaluating a number of options to rapidly develop web applications. Stay tuned.
• We’re working on an application to integrate Moneyworks accounting software with web stores…

We aren’t really a web site company, but when organisations that are trying to do something that’s both helping to provide jobs for poor Nepalis and is fun, we can’t say no ;-)

Now, not many of you will be in the market for a sgiandubh (“A what??” – a small knife worn by Scotsmen with their kilts). But if you are. The Real Sgian Dubh Company has knives that are hand crafted in Nepal. Beautiful, helps Nepali craftsmen, and a chunk of the profits go to help the The International Nepal Fellowship, which does good things in health and development in Nepal.

mSupply has been extended to handle inventory control and dispensing functions at Prince Wellington Ngu Hosptial, Vava’u. Maybe one of the most beautiful places on earth- and a busy hospital too!

The Gurkha Welfare Scheme has chosen Moneyworks for its accounting systems. GWS is a charity that provides care to over 10,000 ex-servicemen in Nepal.

Our mSupply software has been installed in the Solomon Islands’ National Referral Hospital, where it handles both store management and dispensing functions. On a busy day they process over 800 prescription items.

We are very proud of the latest version of mSupply
The most noticeable change is a new “navigator” that presents a graphical interface for all the available operations in mSupply.
This PDF file” explains more.

mSupply v186 has now been released.

New features added to the software include:

• Automatic checking for new versions of mSupply.
• Manufacturers can now be defined as a separate category from suppliers, and each incoming item have a manufacturer defined.
• Several reports now have an added ìopen in Excelî option
• In multi-user use, mSupply now remembers the Excel (Or Staroffice Calc) location for each user.
• Opening reports in Excel creates a temporary file and opens the report without any further user intervention. (Remember to save the report to the location of your choice before closing Excel if you want to keep it!)
• New names can be added directly from the names list window
• Reminders now record the user who created each reminder. You can view and edit reminders created by you that others should action as well as reminders for you to action. The reminders list is now sortable and has resizable columns

For more information please visit the mSupply website

mSupply v1.5r1 was released today.
It incorporates many new features and several bug fixes.
Visit the mSupply web site for more information