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Enhancing Employee Provident Fund System

Through MMS-Based Account Statement
Mohd Hilmi Hasan and Ahmad Nazrin Ab Manah

Abstract—Mobile devices’ usage has evolved from mere phone call devices to personal management, education and
entertainment devices. They have also gained interest in coustomer service system such as for banking, traffic summon and
many others. The objective of this paper is to present the enhancement of current employee provident fund system which sends
account statements to users via SMS. The system has been developed in three-tier architecture and tested by 35 respondents.
It accepts request from users in SMS, does information searching, converts account information into PDF document, and sends
the PDF document to users via MMS. The system has been evaluated through functional and user acceptance tests. The
system is successfully developed and believed can improve the SMS-based employee provident fund system. The study implies
time saving for users as MMS-based account statement can be used for official transactions on top of its flexibility that
accessible anytime and anywhere. For future works, the system should be equipped with more security measures to ensure its
reliability. It is also proposed that both MMS-based and SMS-based functionalities are integrated into a single system to offer
more benefits to users.

Index Terms—MMS, MMS-based system, MMS-based receipt, SMS-based system.

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

M OBILE phone has gained increasing demand and

now become important part of human lives. Its
usage has evolved from merely a device to make
phone calls to become a device for personal management,
learning and entertainment [1]. Its huge demand had
made mobile business become very significant, in which
it is reported that 92 countries have generated more than
10 million mobile advertisement requests in May 2010 [2].
The driving forces for these increasing needs of mobile
devices are believed to be the explosion of the develop-
ment of mobile applications and services. As a result, the
usage of mobile devices has been expanding to various
sectors including banking [3], business [4] and gaming
[5]. Mobile service such as m-commerce has proven to
provide range of business opportunities and streams of
revenue for business across industry. Recent industry
forecasts have projected that m-commerce will gain more
significant growth globally in future [6].
This paper presents yet another useful mobile service
for retrieving account statement of employee provident
fund (EPF). Numerous works have been done before to
provide mobile services to users. One example is a project
done in India that integrates web and mobile technologies
to deliver students’ examination results. Students may
request for examination results by sending request via
SMS. The system will then reply with their results via
SMS [7]. Moreover, the study in [8] develops an informa-
tion portal to provide university’s library, registrar,
enrollment, grading and accounting information. The
system has a feature to send required information to users
————————————————
• Mohd Hilmi Hasan is with CIS Department, Universiti Teknologi
PETRONAS, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia.
• Ahmad Nazrin Ab Manah is a graduate from Universiti Teknologi PE-
TRONAS, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia.
© 2011 Journal of Computing Press, NY, USA, ISSN 2151-9617
http://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing/
via SMS. In this system, users have to make request
through the portal. The system will search the requested
information in its database and send it to users via SMS.
Additionally, the work done in [9] describes that a se-
cured and efficient m-banking services will benefit bank-
ing institutions and their customers. Realizing this, nu-
merous banks now have provided m-banking services
such as balance enquiry and phone pre-paid credit pur-
chase [10], [11]. These systems require their users to make
requests by sending mobile security pin and transaction
keyword via SMS. The transaction receipts or information
will then delivered to users via SMS. In fact, EPF system
also has offered mobile services to its users for account
statement inquiry [12]. In this system, users have to send
request via SMS and will receive the required information
in SMS message.
Mobile services as described earlier have granted nu-
merous benefits to users such as time saving, since users
do not need to go to banks to check for account balance or
go to university to retrieve examination results. Moreo-
ver, mobile services utilize SMS as interface, which is us-
er-friendly and accessible anytime and anywhere. In spite
of these benefits, some limitations do exist. This paper
focused on two issues. The first issue relates to the limited
number of characters per SMS. This limitation is imposed
by the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)
technology which allows mobile devices to exchange SMS
with a maximum length of 160 7-bit characters per SMS
only [13]. As a result, information that is to be included in
SMS message must be condensed which may require
some information to be exluded from the message. In re-
lation to account statement for EPF, it requires a lot of
information to be included in reply message to users.
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Hence, SMS reply message is not suitable for this pur-
pose. The second issue is SMS-based account statement
cannot be used for official uses, which usually require
formal-looked printed slip. That means, users may re-
trieve their EPF account statement via SMS but for per-
sonal purpose only. If they want to use it for official use,
such as buying house, they have to retrieve the account
statement again either from portal or physically going to
service counters. Therefore, this study proposed an en-
hancement of EPF system that allows users to retrieve
aoocunt statements in MMS. This enhancement was de-
veloped to overcome the two issues explained earlier.
Users have to send their request via SMS, but will receive
account statements in MMS. This means that the devel-
oped system focused on complementing the current SMS-
based system. The benefits of the current system are pre-
served while adding extra benefits, specifically in over-
coming the two issues.
MMS-based system has been implemented in learning
in which it allows instant communication between lectur-
ers and students [14]. In this system, lecturers can instant-
ly respond to students’ questions through MMS. It also
allows for instant evaluation such as interactive quizzes
and assignments. However, the system does not have
features which allow students to request for information
and retrieve the information automatically via MMS.
Moreover, the study in [15] describes the architecture for
a system that enables the sending and receiving of MMS
messages using mobile phones. In this system, Web Ser-
vices Description Language (WSDL) is used to support
this features. Furthermore, it is also believed that the im-
plementation MMS in mobile applications can provide
significant benefits to users. MMS has great potential to
generate additional revenue in m-commerce by facilitat-
ing the introduction of m-commerce applications [16].
This is partly due to the MMS’s nature which can provide
information density and information relevance in its ser-
vices. These two factors are very important in mobile ap-
lications such as m-learning system [17]. To achieve this,
the information retrieved from database will be converted
into PDF document. This PDF document will then sent to
users’ mobile phones via MMS [18], [19].
On the whole, the objective of this paper was to en-
hance the SMS-based EPF system by implementing the
sending of account statements via MMS. The developed
system was named as MMS-based EPF System (MMS-ES).
2 METHODOLOGY
This study started with literature survey and information
gathering works. Results from this works had been used
in the then analysis process to produce system require-
ments. As the system requirements verified, the study
continued with system design activities in which architec-
ture, system flow, use case diagram and database were
designed. The development works took place then in
which program coding and verification activities were
performed iteratively until the initial prototype evolved
as the final product. The verification proceses were done
by benchmarking with the system requirements found
17
earlier. Lastly, the developed system was tested using
functional and user acceptance tests. There were 35 res-
pondents involved in the user acceptance tests.
2.1 DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
A Microsft Windows-based personal computer was used
in this study for sytem development as well as to act as a
server. In addition, A Sony Ericsson W800i/W700i mobile
phone was used to act as GSM modem that enables the
sending and receiving of SMS and MMS messages.
Regarding software, Macromedia Dreamweaver was
used as the development tool. Besides, PHP scripting lan-
guage and MySQL Server 5.0 was used for programming
and database respectively. Moreover, NowSMS software
was used in this study as a middleware to manage the
interfacing between GSM modem and system applica-
tions. It also managed SMS and MMS transactions.
2.2 System Architecture
Fig. 1 shows the system architecture of the developed
system. A user initiates the request for account statement
by sending his/her required information to the system
via SMS. In this system, the required information is user
ID and user’s identification (IC) number. This information
must be written in SMS in the following format:
ACC<space>USER ID<space>IC NUMBER
GSM modem will receive information send by user
and forward it to server. On server, the NowSMS soft-
ware performs the conversion process upon the received
information. The information, which is received in PDU
format, will be converted into text. This information is
saved into inbox table in NowSMS database. The MMS-ES
system is also installed on the server. This system con-
tains PHP module which purposely functions to check for
new incoming request from user. The module is of set of
scripts that continuously performs checking procedure by
retrieving data from NowSMS database. If there is new
request, the module will invoke a process to request for
the information from NowSMS database. The received
information is then forwarded to another module in
MMS-ES system to perform the trimming process. As a
result, the information is divided into three parts namely
phone number, user ID and IC number. Then, another
module in the system will be in control to perform the
information validation process. The account information
will be searched in MMS-ES system’s database using user
ID and IC number. Two significant items are validated in
this process; firstly to check whether there is account in-
formation for the specific IC number. Secondly, if there is
any, the user ID sent by user will be validated whether it
matches with the user ID information retrieved from the
database. If at least one of these two validation processes
fails, the system will instruct for fail message to be sent to
user. In contrast, if the validation process succeeds, the
account information will be forwarded to other module
for conversion. In this particular module, the text infor-
mation of user’s account is converted into PDF document
using FPDF features provided by PHP. The produced
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NowSMS Phone No, ID,

Software IC No
Send ID, IC No Send ID, NowSMS
IC No Database

Account statement Account statement

User (PDF format) GSM (PDF format) Trigger for
Modem MMS delivery

Request ID,
IC no
MMS-ES Send ID, IC no
System Search
Server
information

EPF System
Send account Database
data
Fig.1. System architecture.

PDF document is then saved temporarily in the system’s

destination file. The overall processes involved in the de-
veloped system are shown in Fig. 2.

Request Receive
Now-
account request
SMS
statement software
Receive and trim information

Send MMS-
Search information (database) based
Receive
statement
account
User statement

Validate
Invoke
information
validation
Fail Success procedure

Invoke fail reply message Convert information into MMS-

PDF document Convert ES
information System
into PDF
Invoke MMS reply

Invoke MMS
reply
Fig.2. Process flow.

The system will then forward this PDF document and

user’s phone number to NowSMS software to create an Fig.3. Use Case diagram.
MMS message. This MMS message will then be for-
warded by the NowSMS software to GSM modem. Final-
ly this modem forwards the MMS message to user’s mo-
bile phone. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show the overall process of
the developed system in use case diagram and context
diagram respectively.
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User ID

IC number

Account statement
(MMS)
User Account statement NowSMS
(PDF)

Phone
number

MMS-ES system IC number

User ID

Fig.4. System Context diagram.

Fig.6. Account statement in PDF received via MMS.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
3.1 Prototype
The MMS-ES system had successfully been developed
and Fig. 5 shows the format of request SMS sent by user.
3.2 Functional Test
The developed system had gone through a number of
functional tests throughout the development process. The
tests and development had been performed iteratively
until the system evolved as final product. The tests were
conducted to evaluate whether the system conformed to
the requirements. Table 1 shows the test cases used in
performing the functional tests.

TABLE 1
TEST CASES FOR SYSTEM TESTING
Test Case
1. The respondent sends a
valid request SMS to the
system
2. The respondent sends a
valid request SMS to the
Fig.5. Request message via SMS.
system
3. The respondent sends a
The SMS message shown in Fig.5 shall be sent to GSM valid request SMS to the
modem and server as explained in the previous section. If system
the provided user ID and IC number are valid, then the 4. The respondent sends an
invalid request SMS to the
MMS-ES system will reply to user with the MMS that system
contains his/her account statement. Fig. 6 shows the 5. The respondent sends a
MMS message received by user. valid request SMS to the
system but invalid user ID or
IC number
Expected Outcome
The respondent should get a
reply MMS message
The respondent should get the
correct account statement
The respondent should get a
readable account statement in
PDF document
The system should respond with
a proper failure SMS message
The system should respond with
a proper failure SMS message

3.3 User Acceptance test

The developed system was also tested for user accep-
tance. In this test, 35 respondents participated to validate
the system based on the test cases shown in Table 1.
Fig. 7 shows the user acceptance test’s results. About
93% of the test activities had produced success results. On
the other hand, there were 7% of the activities performed
in this test had failed. Two respondents had gotten failure
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results in all of the test cases, while another one respon-
dent obtained failure results in test cases 1, 2 and 3. All of
the failure cases were due to limitation in error-handling
mechanisms.
Fig.7. Results of user acceptance test.
4 CONCLUSION
The developed system enables users to request for
employee provident fund’s account statement by send-
ing request SMS. The system will send the account
statement in PDF document to users via MMS. The
system implies benefit in terms of time saving, and
produces statement that can be requested anytime and
anywhere, yet it can be used in official transactions.
The system consists of NowSMS software and the
MMS-ES system. The former has functionalities to
manage the incoming and outgoing of the SMS and
MMS messages. The later contains PHP modules
which perform the searching of users’ information in
database, and converting text-based information into
PDF document. The conversion process is done by us-
ing PHP’s FPDF features. Besides, the system also con-
tains GSM modem which functions to interface be-
tween users’ mobile phones and the system. Users may
only interact with the system through mobile phones
as requests and replies are in SMS and MMS respec-
tively.
For future works, more security measures can be
implemented to produce a more reliable system.
Moreover, the system may also be enhanced by inter-
grating both SMS and MMS reply features. The ac-
count information in SMS is suitable for personal uses
while the other, which in MMS, is suitable for official
uses.
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Mohd Hilmi Hasan obtained his Bachelors of Technolgy (Hons.) in
Information Techology from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS in
2002. He then received Masters of Information Technology (eS-
cience) from The Australian National University in 2004. Currently,
he is working as lecturer in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, which
his roles amongst others are teaching and doing research. His re-
search interests are mobile computing and artificial intelligence. He
had secured a number of research grants from the university’s inter-
nal grant as well national grant awarded by Malaysian government.
Ahmad Nazrin Ab Manah was an undergraduate student of Univer-
siti Teknologi PETRONAS. He graduated and obtained Bachelors of
Technology (Hons.) in Information and Communication Technology
in 2009.