Page 369 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS500 Fauzana I. et al.
Enabling monitoring and forecasting the price trend in future as well as a useful
input for the government to decide on the price control.

4. Discussion and Conclusion
The session of transfer of knowledge and technology are also conducted
from time to time. The main objective of the session is to transfer knowledge
and skills to the Department of Statistics manpower to ensure DOSM has all
the necessary skill set to manage and support all modules related to the
StatsBDA project. Knowledge is transferred in the form of formal classroom
training on the tools used to develop the system, system administration
training and application usage training as well as technical documentation
covering the system architecture, design and user. In respect of Price
Intelligence Module, one of the way forward is to keep updating the Price
Intelligence dictionary. The Price Intelligence dictionary involved the adoption
of the COICOP. In terms of QA and QC data dictionary, five permanent
manpower and four daily short-term manpower were allocated to update the
existing dictionary into new dictionary. They are from consumer price index unit
and Price Intelligence Unit. The dictionary is already developed with one
hundred and fifty plus items with COICOP Malaysia at seven digits level where
altogether there were 800 item specifications in Consumer Price Index basket.
The proposition is to complete the balance of the item according to the main
groups. The priorities were given to food item (groceries), clothing and
footwear, household equipment items and electrical goods as well as personal
care items.
Another way forward is to increase the number of e-commerce websites
and the number of item covered. Apart from that, is to study the effectiveness
of online prices as input to the CPI calculation and as an alternatives to the
manual survey of DOSM, besides saving cost and time. Strategic collaboration
with agency that deals with national price council in maximising price data in
price lake is also conducted. In the meantime, the price lake itself is also needs
to be enhanced as a way forward. Way Forward is also in extending this Price
Intelligence Module to be accessed by the provider of our online data which is
also known as the price catcher. This is in line with the facing challenges
nowadays in terms of cost of living aspects. Access to the Price Intelligence
Visualisation for data namely Price Catcher, Tesco and Manual Survey DOSM
where the average price of one hundred items are already published. These
one hundred items are selected based on the most significant consumption of
users in Malaysia. For the Price Intelligence Module in relation to human
resources, for first level support, personnels from Management of Information
Division will be responsible for the maintenance and monitoring the data
crawling. For the second and third level support, it will be implemented by the

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