covid19ERP

In view of the collapse of supplies and equipment needed in health centres, we considered it necessary to design a tool (ERP) that would put the needs of health centres in contact with the suppliers that could provide these needs

Hackaton UE Covid19ERP

“Covid19ERP, The Market Brain Against Covid19” Matters to explain:

Inspiration During the COVID-19 crisis different problems came up product of a deficient provision of health materials to combat the pandemic. Our health personnel is the contention barrier against this kind of crisis and their victims are the weakest members of our society: our old citizens. Currently Europe depends extremely on China for the provision of all types of health products, from those needed to protect to health professionals, to those needed for the citizens, as so other products required by the hospital system. That dependency, during the COVID 19 crisis, has severely worsen or indeed stopped the normal supply chain of health materials, imposing a significant damage to the situation of the health sector, as so, the to society and economy of our EU countries. To confront to this kind of challenges, Europe has to count with tools that match efficiently this type of product demand. Production has to be manufactured by European companies, in a way that the EU gets a resilient economy and builds a circular economy for SMEs and professionals. To accomplish that mission it is mandatory to know exactly the products demand that exists in each health center and nursing home. Only this knowledge and and its correct management, will let us to prevent millions of infections, millions of secondary effects of these pathologies and save millions of lives of our citizens. To solve that we have built a MARKET BRAIN.

What it does We have created “The Market Brain Against Covid19”, a software platform, based on an global ERP, that is already running in production to fight against COVID-19. Via a customers web portal we collect the needs of materials from all health centers and nursing homes. Via another web portal, the provider’s one, we get information about the products and capacities of all those makers and industries offering their health products for free to our customers. Commonly those altruist products are protections materials for health and nursing staffs, but Covid19ERP is also managing the delivery of products ranging from consumable pieces for ventilators to, as far as, laptops for poor university students to be able to continue education remotely. The platform, nominally operated by a semi-public entity (a professional official IT association) and organized as if it were a complete wholesale company, grants to transactions legal certainty, traceability, transparency, neutrality, fiscal deductions for donors, and, in the future, notarial registry of all transactions in a blockchain DLT as a way to serve as warrantied prove for justice courts if needed. The system is currently able to analyze the whole demand, from all health centers and nursing homes from Spain, generate sales orders, control stocks, assign production orders to manufacturers, prepare the delivery order for a logistic company to move materials from the donors to the customers, and control the whole process with legal documents and traceability (serial numbers or lot numbers). The assignation of a production order is done according to on demand programmed algorithms based on received orders and production capabilities of each donor able to make the requested products. Also, based on the history of demand and offer, the system allows to plan the production in order to best match future demand.

How we built it The system is based on an integration of different business open source software products, being the core an ERP based on Odoo Community with different functional modules that cover sales, purchases, warehousing and stocks, CRM, call center, management dashboards, reporting, internal staff management and invoicing. The ERP is integrated with a massive e mail system used to send the legal PDF documents to all the parties (customer, provider and logistic company). In the future it is planned to integrate also a Magento e-commerce to serve more easily to customers, a business intelligence based on Pentaho with improved dashboard featuring, artificial intelligence to analysis collected data, and a notary service based on Django to perpetually register all steps and documents of the transactions in a blockchain (IOTA Tangle). Additionally, in order to escalate, a team of telemarketing operator from a partner company, plus an integrated communication system has been used. Logistically the platform is operating via the drop shipping technique, but it is also able to manage physical warehouses from third partners managing their internal movements and controlling their actual and advanced product stocks.

Challenges we ran into To collect and load in the platform data and contacts from all the hospitals (+1000), first attention health centers (+14.000), nursing homes (several tens of thousands), etc. including public and private ones. Convince to different actors that are fighting against COVID19 in Spain to best use the platform instead of delivering without actual warranty and legal coverage. This third parties include 3D makers, industrial companies, logistic companies, health system entities, official professional associations of engineers and doctors, and public administrations. A challenge has been also to warranty maximum legality to transactions documents. Indeed, it may be improved in the future with a digital signature of those PDF documents. Traceability was also an issue, since the system is dealing with products that actually are fabricated by a third party, the donors. Programming algoritms to asign production orders to makers and industries has been also challenging, specially when it is a neverending mobile target that will be refactorized along the life of the projects. Management of stocks, real and future, including sizes and variables as homologated and not homologated. Also, it is a challenge to provide raw materials to 3D makers in order to help them to focus only on production, instead of on provisioning the materials they need. Finally, it was a chalenge that had to be also programmed the notification with a single delivery note to the three parties implicated on the moving of final products process: donor, logistic company and final customer, each one with its contact persons if so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We have got different non-profit initiatives collaborating all orchestrated by the ERP Platform. The currently implemented features, fully running in production, are the following: • Identification of real demand of protection health materials with exact detail of each product segmented by Hospitals, Primary Health Centers, Nursing Homes and others. Also by NUTS territories and indeed postal codes. • Identification with good precision of productive capacity of each altruist manufacturer with details for each product that is able to manufacture. • Exact control of the stock of products in each different third-party wharehouse • Capacity to predict stock in advance (virtual stock vs real stock). • Management of raw materials needed for each production. • Good estimation of production costs, serving also as justification for tax exemption. • Traceability of the whole process with (to be finished) notary registry on a blockchain DLT • Full respect and warranties in terms of data protection EUR regulations. • Automatic integration with logistic companies. • Efficient and dynamic algorithms to assign production orders to manufacturers according to pre-fixed business rules. • Dasboard: demand managemente, costs, real product stocks, advanced product stocks, supply chain capabilities and adjusts, etc. • Technical and legal documentation and information for manufacturers (technical designs, standards, homologations, manuals, specifications, etc.), for health professionals and citizens. • Collaboration with Public Administrations in a way that donations can be justified, quantified and valued by a neutral third party acting as auditor. • The system is multi-language, multi-country and multi-currency. • Severe and detailed user authorization control may be customized on demand. • Easy of business processes in general for all the involved parts, with business process guided by legal documents.

What we learned We have learned that it is important to create a solution that is pioneer in the market to solve an existing problem, but that, at the same time it coverts with easy end user expectations.

To get this kind of solution running in productive it is needed that the information that it manages complies with quality, completion and state of the art.

It is important to explain the solution with all its advantages, in order to involve the different needed actors, specially in as difficult situations as currently.

To get a project as this in productive use is a real challenge. It needs the participation of many different actors and its coordination. But it is worth the effort because the great impact that it provides against COVID-19.

From the beginning it was a key aspect of the design to escalate to all the EU millions of citizens, as actually the platform can do.

This project has a high social value. It gets in site health materials in a efficient manner, protecting to European population and lowering negative impact of COVID19 in society and economy.

What's next for Covid19ERP It is pending to improve marketing of the solution to get it used by as much European players as possible… and for free. It needs to populate its databases with all the health centers from the rest of the EU countries, apart of Spain. Also with manufacturers from all alround Europe serving their stocks to customers all around Europe. It will be needed to create a base o telemarketing operators for each European national language to be able to deal with operations for/to the whole continent. The software platform is quite flexible and it is pretended to be dynamically adapted and improved to future requests and optimizations. It is needed to improve the analytic capabilities of the platform, based on the experience got with its use and the collected data. Artificial Intelligence techniques it expected to be used to confront future Covid19 waves and health crisis. A rich e-commerce portal for customers is still to be finished and integrated with the ERP replacing the current web form. It will be needed to improve the technical infrastructure to escalate in terms of, mainly, hardware. In terms of software may be already prepared but escalation tests must be done. The E-Notary Registry in IOTA Tangle is still to be integrated. Currently only the middleware to Tangle is operating, since it is a multi-project service already in productive use, but the module into the ERP is still pending to finished.

Built With (Technologies) The technologies that have been and are being integrated and adapted to build the Covid19ERP are all them open source software. Among the main ones are: • The ERP Odoo in its Community version (programmed in Python and Javascript) • The e-commerce portal Magento (programmed in PHP and Javascript) • The web portal WordPress (programmed in PHP and Javascript) • An massive e-mail service based on Odoo as e-mail client, and Postfix, Amavis, Clamav, Spamassasin, services for SPF and DKIM, etc. (several languajes) • A business intelligence system based on the community version of Pentaho (Java), that complements the dashboards of Odoo Community. • A blockchain notary service developed from scratch by iotalinux.com on Django & Python and into Odoo Community, that posts hash or messages to the IOTA Tangle DLT (Acylic Graph DAG, actually) • PostgreSQL and MariaDB in cluster configuration as data base managers for all the systems. • Everything running on Linux Debian stable servers, and combined with several security measures as inverse proxy, honeypot, etc. • Shinken as monitoring services • A tool developed from scratch Python & Django from Opentia to orchestrate all the servers an services administration tasks. • OpenBSD packet filter for the firewalls • Xen as paravirtualization system for all physical servers. • Heartbeat for the high availability service of all physical services in a active-passive configuration. • Standard internet browsers as clients

Links to Covid19erp: • The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7oqYvqldxw&rel • The project web: https://www.covid19erp.org • The platform (productive environment): https://plataforma.covid19erp.org (htpasswd: covid/covid) • The platform (testing environment): https://test.erp.es.covid.opentia.net/ (htpasswd: covid/covid) • Please ask to covid19@opentia.com for login info to systems and to source code in git.

A proposal by: • Official Professional Association of Informatics Engineers of Andalusia – www.cpiiand.es (as current neutral and legal holder of the service) • Grupo Opentia – www.opentia.com • Gruop eTICa – eticagrupo.com • T2V – www.t2v.com • ICCS – www.iccs.es