USSD System for Monitoring and Management of Employee Leave in Higher Educational Institution

Abstract

Unstructured supplementary service data also referred to as feature code or quick code has become a monumental part of services and products offered by Telecommunication Operators, and its application to various areas of telecommunication and real-world scenarios. It is a protocol of communication utilized by global system for mobile communications cell phones to communicate with mobile telecommunication network operators and applicable to various areas of trend in modern information technology sectors such as Wireless Application Protocol browsing, mobile-money services, prepaid call back services, menu-based information services, location-based content services, paid content portal, voting surveys, and product promotion. This system was designed by integrating the designed unstructured supplementary service data channel for employee leave management system into the standard global system for mobile communications architecture. The architecture consists of three parts; the front end, the middle end, and the back end. The system is implemented using PHP for the overall programming, MySQL for the database, and Windows 7 operating system as a development environment with Adobe dream weaver CS3 IDE. Apache TOMCAT webserver was used to host the system locally. Two interfaces were developed; one side with the mobile operators, which requires setting up of SS7 stack and the unstructured supplementary service data application over the stack. On the other side, HTTP-basedAPIs were used for the unstructured supplementary service data application. Several types of leaves exist and their usage depends on educational institution policies. An employee may apply for study leave like maternity leave, sick leave, and annual leave. Paper-based work is time consuming, USSD based activities are very simple and effective. This research work was conducted to solve the leave management in an academic institution using the USSD. Using the developed system, 1326 USSD sessions were recorded, 1238 sessions were successful, 59 were incomplete, and 29 failed. Cumulative findings from the 41 respondents reveal that the system is faster, more convenient, and user-friendly than the manual method of applying and managing employee leave, which indicates 94% of the success of the system. Thus, it can be concluded that the system was able to manage the leave management very well and very effectively.