Koert Breebaart's video: How technology can save lives when the disaster strikes

Hi! I am Koert. The Chief Commercial Officer of a social Venture called Relief.iO. We need to talk about the future of the 140 million people that are affected every year by sudden onset natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunami’s and typhoons. If there is one part of the world where disasters make daily headlines, it is here in South East Asia. When the disaster strikes, many NGO’s, the United Nations, RedCross and government agencies flock in to help. With these many actors and millions of dollars of backing - you would expect that things would turn back to normal very quickly. But, unfortunately, this is the reality more often than not. Although UN OCHA is doing a fantastic job in coordinating large NGO and government agencies to reduce duplicate effort, we are still far removed from real time supply chain optimization, getting the right goods in the hands of those who most need it. And what company is better in solving supply and demand imbalances? Right, SAP. That is where this guy works. Meet Carsten, the founder of Relief.iO. He asked himself these questions: 1. How many lives can we safe if we get goods faster to those in need? 2. How many more victims can be helped had there been better coordination? 3. How can SAP technology connect people and organization involved in disaster relief become more efficient, reduce costs and safe more lives? He gathered a team of passionate SAP colleagues to build something that SAP is best at: a disaster relief supply chain collaboration platform, or in short Relief.iO. And here it is! Let me explain how this works. Imagine I am in the field and I encounter a village with 100 families largely impacted by a natural disaster. My NGO and I like to help the villagers, so I log a new activity. I identify what disaster I am working on and in what cluster the activity falls. I like to provide food, so I choose Nutrition. Then I select the activity type. In this case Food Relief Packs. I enter I need 100 packs as we are helping 100 families and I add myself as the contact person. Then I select on a map where the 100 packs are requested for and by when they need to be delivered. And I give the activity the status “Requested”. I can then take a photo and leave a comment on the situation I encountered for others to benefit. The central planner from my NGO gets notified that a new activity is generated. That person can look into the Activity Dashboard to see visually on a map all activities relevant to the NGO. The planner can filter and scroll through the activities and decide on changes to the quantity, timing and status of the planned activities. This enables much better collaboration between field and office workers, as well as automated reporting capabilities for donors, increasing speed and reducing internal costs. But the real value of the platform is in its ability to enable cross NGO collaboration. In the notification board I can see what other activities have similar characteristics as the one I am planning. This matching is done by machine learning algorithms based on activity type, distance and timing. Through the notifications I can find out who from another NGO is planning for example a similar food drop to same island just 2 days earlier. I can use the app to reach out to the person of the other NGO, somebody I didn’t know before, to obtain contextual information or to establish if there may be overlap, reduce logistics costs or even discuss joined sourcing of food packs. In summary the Relief.iO cloud platform has the ability to create transparency across different NGOs, governments and various other stakeholders to make them collaborate, reducing inefficiencies, duplication of efforts and costs, while saving the lives of more people. We are currently in the process of piloting this app with a couple of NGO’s in The Philippines to get more insight on the potential collaboration areas and the value the platform creates. In 2019 we hope to get more stakeholders on board as the platform matures. If you are a donor, a government, an NGO or another organization with interest in this great cause, please reach out to us. We are happy to work with you completely free of charge or other obligations. It is our dream to impact millions of lives with Relief.iO.