## 3 Methodology
### The Analysis of the Existing Paper-Based System  
At this point, it was necessary to analyze the existing blood bank system to recognize and define the problem. This step involved dividing the system into stages to facilitate  
Figure 1: The structure of the blood bank work in Iraq.  
Figure 2: The methodology of the study.  
analyzing the situation, detect the main goals, select what needs to be created, and engage the manager and medical staff to define the new system requirements. Tikrit's Central Blood Bank was chosen as an actual case study to collect all the data required to design the new system. It is considered the authority responsible for managing and distributing blood and its components within the governorate.  
The following techniques were used to gather the information:  
1. In this study, a structured and semi-structured interview has been conducted. The structured interviews conducted with a limited set of pre-prepared questions, with the manager and the medical staff. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain more intensive information. This type of interview is characterized by adaptability, allowing new questions, along with the pre-prepared ones, to be raised in response and discussion of what the interviewees say [44; 45];
2. Documentation: the official document (the official guide) [43] provides the work policies and rules that the blood banks should apply under the supervision of the Iraqi Ministry of Health and was adopted as the source of required information in this study.  
These techniques helped us to analyze the existing system, which is described as follows.  
The Flow of the Existing System  
The three blood donation entities in the Salah ad-Din governorate are managed manually. Every day, the existing systems must maintain nearly a hundred records. In an emergency, it can be difficult to find an exact match between the blood groups of the donor and the patient. This may cause a delay in blood transfusion within the specified time, which may lead to a severe error.  
The current mechanism is described in detail for the Central Blood Bank in Appendix A, which is summarized as follows:  
1. All blood bank procedures and operations (blood tests, blood wasting, blood production, blood supply, blood group matching, blood production) are managed and monitored through a paper-file-based, traditional system;
2. The information on blood donations and donors is saved via an Excel file; there is no central digital database;
3. The bank's management relies on traditional methods to store blood bags and inventory control;
4. The daily updated data (between the three entities) are manually recorded and displayed via the WhatsApp application;
5. The daily donation process is followed by all details of the preparation of the patients in hospitals or sub-centers through the paper record, which is produced daily by the responsible employee in the reception unit;
6. The communication process between the three entities is conducted via WhatsApp.  
Finally, it is worth declaring that, in the analysis phase, we chose to use the parallel operation method to convert the paperwork-based system into the new, proposed system with an initial period of one month for operating and for testing. This conversion occurred because the old system's technology was obsolete. Parallel running is defined as the strategy to convert from the current (old) system to the new one after studying its problems and flaws by running the two systems alongside each other, entering the same data, and executing the same processing steps. The outputs are then compared, and the new system's reliability and performance are verified [46]. If the new system is accepted after the indicated time, the existing system will stop operating and will be replaced by the new system. Figure 3 illustrates the parallel running method.