Pan American Health Organization

Problem

The volume of relief supplies that arrive for large-scale disasters poses serious logistical problems for national authorities. The Pan American Health Organization needed an easily deployed and intuitive system for managing supplies arriving at entry points and throughout their warehousing and final distribution lifecycle. The system also needed to consolidate data from stock and pipeline supplies in order to provide a high level view of disaster relief management.

In addition to logistics management capabilities, PAHO needed to ensure transparency and accountability throughout the supply chain. All stakeholders, including donors, national disaster coordinators, non-governmental organizations and government officials, needed to be confident that supplies were being managed properly and distributed correctly.

Solution

FMS and the client chose Microsoft .NET to maximize the use of industry-standard expertise and support. A Windows desktop application as well as a web-based application using ASP.NET were created to allow PAHO to manage deployments in varied environments and on an unpredictable array of hardware.

To store the large volume of data, Microsoft SQL Server was chosen. SQL Server provides the secure, reliable, and highly performant environment to host the data and provide future scalability.

Key Features

• User friendly UI to make system use and training easy
• Inventory tracking
• A common classification system for goods tracked by PAHO, UNICEF and the World Health Organization
• Rich reporting and data mining
• Aggregation of data from distributed warehouse systems to the United Nations Joint Logistics headquarters system