COVAID

Inspiration

Until now, efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic have been focused on procuring and producing medical equipment. We’re starting to finally see a flow of equipment arrive from overseas as well as converted factories that are producing supplies with which to protect medical professionals worldwide. While gathering information about how hospitals usually work with stock, we discovered that they usually request protective equipment on a place by place basis, lacking a general view of the stock reserves and needs.

Nextail was created to help retailers solve the lack of flexibility in the distribution of goods. This is done by providing a general overview of the future demand (through our forecasting algorithms) as well as an optimization of the replenishment, reducing stockout while maximizing stock reserves in the distribution centers. This allows retailers to react to demand fluctuations even at daily level. And we believe that we can bring this value to healthcare as well.

What it does

Efficiently manage and allocate the material to the hospitals as it arrives in each country, given the global shortage of these supplies.

How I built it

Predicting local demand to optimally manage available stock is what we specializes on and what we do every day for the retail industry. For five years we have been applying artificial intelligence to automate decisions of how and where to allocate the stocks of retail chains across the world.

Challenges I ran into

We will have to adapt our algorithms to cater to the need of predicting demand across hospitals.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

For the COVID-19 crisis we make all of our technology available to local and national governments. We can digitize and automate resource management to ensure the medical equipment goes to where it is most needed. And we can do it fast as our platform can be up and running in a matter of days.

What I learned

We have learned that even in the most difficult situations there is still something that we can do to solve it, thanks to people collaboration and initiatives like EUvsVirus, we can join strengths to fight the crisis.

As per our project, investigating hospitals supply chain we discovered that there is a lot of room for improvement where we can help.

What's next for COVAID

Next we have to go gain deeper knowledge of the healthcare supply chain, as well as a good network. We will also need to evaluate the need for external investment to ensure the viability of the proposal.