Under the patronage of his Excellency Mr. Ibrahim bin Mohammad Al-Homaizi, the GM of consumer price index directorate, the General Authority for statistics (GAS) inaugurated a workshop to review and discuss the evaluation results of deploying the handheld mobile computers in collecting prices from the retail stores and business establishments in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) directorate has successfully finished the testing phase of a mobile software application supplied by MobiSoft to automate the price collection process.

The CPI and IT departments presented their experience with the system during the trial period and expressed their satisfaction with the outcomes.

So, GAS will replace their current way of collecting the price information on papers with the new electronic system starting from Jan. 2016.

MobiSoft’s CPI application is an Android based software package that can integrate with the CPI database at a certain data centre and load the required work assignments into a local device. The assignments are work orders for the surveyors to collect the prices and other relevant information for the products and services from specific retail stores according to a pre-set surveying plan, the collected data is then transferred over a wireless network back to the database for further validation, reviewing and processing to compile the CPI and inflation indicators.

The CPI application also involves integration with the Global Positioning System (GPS) in a way that captures the GPS data and save them into the CPI database.

Furthermore, it checks and validates the surveyor’s location to ensure that data collection takes place only while being present in the intended establishment.

In addition to KSA, MobiSoft CPI software is currently used by national statistical offices in Oman, Jordan and Iraq.