Inspiration
Working in supply chain, it is common to see many goods expire. But they have good excuses in most cases. What does not have any valid excuse is the mismanagement of disaster relief and disaster aid resources to economically disadvantaged areas. Time and time again, government corruption, poor operational practices, lack of visibility, and ineffective communication have allowed millions upon millions of dollars of life-saving goods to simply expire, without ever reaching the people they were intended to help. Whether it in places like Haiti, where their earthquake relief funds were tragically mismanaged and stolen, or more recently in Puerto Rico, there are always warehouses full of goods that are never distributed. KNIGHT aims to end that today.
What it does
This is an inventory management system, created for the purpose of managing the information and disposition of these goods within a timely and reasonable manner. The roles and financial incentives within the structure will create a higher customer fill rate to the end customer (citizens) by incentiving corrupt officials with the one language they speak - more money. If they have the opprotunity to make more money by effectively distributing the goods than by letting them sit, they will do so. And the US can simply pay more and more to raise their costs - but the end users will get a significantly larger proportion of the goods and relief to them, saving tens of thousands of lives each year.
How we built it
It started as an economic incentive model. Who are the relevant parties? What makes them tick? What is their best move in a situation such as this?
After identifying the issues, I created a system that is optimized for customer fill rate, while being to clearly align the incentives of the preceding parties that were an inhibitor to this higher CFR.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, this was to be built on Cardano's smart contract platform. For obvious reasons, I was thrown for a bit of the loop. So after examining the blockchain and SC space, I determined that this would be the best platform to bring this creation to life. The other issue is finding real life situations to apply this to - getting into the gov contracting space can be extraordinarily difficult. Still working on that, but if you can help get me in the room, message me! :D
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
The truth behind the disaster relief process is so much more messed up and corrupt than you likely think. The government just wants an excuse to spend more money, the corrupt officials just want more money in their pockets. But with this knowledge, a better incentive system can be born.
What's next for Disaster Relief Inventory Mgmt
Build it out, make it the norm, apply it when disaster strikes, measure the impact, learn from the data, improve the process. Repeat.
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