[2018-04-12]
Kim Song Chol, PhD, Prof and head of the economic informatics lab of the Department of Economics at Kim Il Sung University, is credited with pioneering the development of an integrated management information system that suits the socialist planned economy.
The enterprise resource planning controls all production processes and business activities at industrial establishments by computer.
ERP is believed to require a great deal of time and fund to develop.
“We did not want to introduce the ERP tailored to market economies in its entirety. We made up our mind to develop a standardized MIS, which is needed for improving the country’s industrial structure in line with the requirements of the IT age and putting all economic sectors on IT basis,” recalled Kim Song Chol.
The system was of great significance also in ensuring the unified business management and control by the state.
Kim went to industrial establishments to find out factors that affect production processes and business management and grasp their economic principles and, on the basis of this, worked on the master plan for the MIS. Members of his development team also made an indepth analysis of numerous documents on the management of labour, production, fluid assets, power and everything at many factories and enterprises.
Each factory worked out well over a thousand documents a year, and some argued that it was impossible to standardize such extensive business activities.
But the developers pooled their intelligence and passion to make rational designs and write thousands of subroutines.
After years of research they brought out an integrated MIS and introduced it into a factory, but they found there were many faults in labour management and accounting applications.
They did not yield to the failure, but redoubled their efforts to analyse the cause. In the course of the analysis they realized they failed to find out all the factors acting on labour management. So they went out to factories again to discover all other factors with the help of the employees and rounded off the design for labour management functions.
They finally completed Taean 1.0 in January 2012. The chief developer, however, was not yet content with the system.
Therefore, he set a higher goal in keeping with the information technology that continues to develop rapidly on a worldwide scale, and provided role models for his team members. Years later, they came up with Taean 2.0, a version upgraded in terms of information integration, business standardization, app optimization and flexibility.
On his inspection tour of the Pyongyang Mushroom Farm in April 2017, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un highly praised the farm’s MIS and manufacturing management system that helps arrange production and conduct business activities based on real-time monitoring of necessary information.
This system has proved effective in production and business management at more than 40 factories including the Kumkhop General Foodstuff Factory for Sportspeople, Pyongyang Sports Goods Factory and Pyongyang Cosmetics Factory.
Busy as he is with education and research, Kim Song Chol has written many textbooks and reference books about economic informatics, such as Theory of Informatization of Business Management, Dictionary of Commerce, Global Trend of Economic Development in the Age of Information Industry and Major Economic Events in the 20th Century. He also obtained dozens of certificates of registration and introduction of sci-tech hits, certificates of registration of programs and original plans and patents.
For such achievements, he was awarded the February 16 Science and Technology Prize, top honour for DPRK scientists.
He is still devoting himself to the training of talents and the projects to put the national economy on a scientific and IT basis.
 
By Pang Un Ju PT