Description
Helping Hand is an international organization that specializes in relief work across the world. Part of how they achieve this is through monthly clothing and food drives conducted at their warehouse and various community centers across the state. As donations are to be sent overseas, country regulations require that each donation is accounted for in order to determine the value of the resulting shipping container.
Problem
In order to keep track of this incoming inventory, Helping Hand took a paper-and-pencil approach to this task. As items would come in, volunteers would shuffle through a poorly bound clipboard, and tally the corresponding box somewhere on their 17 sheet packet. Once the collection period would be over, that same volunteer would spend about 1-2 weeks meticulously transposing counts and items into an excel spreadsheet in an effort to determine the value of donated goods. As one can imagine, this process was slow, inefficient, and open to many sources of error.
Approach
In order to solve this problem, I tasked myself with a method to overhaul this process. The result was the HHRD Tally App, a mobile application built using Ionic and Angular that completely digitized the inventory management system. The app allowed multiple volunteers to tally on their individual phones with updates streamed to each in realtime. The results were safely backed in Firebase Cloud storage and exportable to an easy to read excel spreadsheet at the conclusion of each collection event.
Outcome
As a result of this application, the donation process has been dramatically streamlined. Inventory accounting is no longer a bottleneck, which allows volunteers to work completely uninhibited. The client themself has reported that the app has saved them months of post-event data aggregation per year and has reduced their error rate to less than 0.3%. The implementation of the app has allowed Helping Hand to save time from having to do monotonous paperwork and lets them instead focus on further advancing the charities.
Description
Helping Hand is an international organization that specializes in relief work across the world. Part of how they achieve this is through monthly clothing and food drives conducted at their warehouse and various community centers across the state. As donations are to be sent overseas, country regulations require that each donation is accounted for in order to determine the value of the resulting shipping container.
Problem
In order to keep track of this incoming inventory, Helping Hand took a paper-and-pencil approach to this task. As items would come in, volunteers would shuffle through a poorly bound clipboard, and tally the corresponding box somewhere on their 17 sheet packet. Once the collection period would be over, that same volunteer would spend about 1-2 weeks meticulously transposing counts and items into an excel spreadsheet in an effort to determine the value of donated goods. As one can imagine, this process was slow, inefficient, and open to many sources of error.
Approach
In order to solve this problem, I tasked myself with a method to overhaul this process. The result was the HHRD Tally App, a mobile application built using Ionic and Angular that completely digitized the inventory management system. The app allowed multiple volunteers to tally on their individual phones with updates streamed to each in realtime. The results were safely backed in Firebase Cloud storage and exportable to an easy to read excel spreadsheet at the conclusion of each collection event.
Outcome
As a result of this application, the donation process has been dramatically streamlined. Inventory accounting is no longer a bottleneck, which allows volunteers to work completely uninhibited. The client themself has reported that the app has saved them months of post-event data aggregation per year and has reduced their error rate to less than 0.3%. The implementation of the app has allowed Helping Hand to save time from having to do monotonous paperwork and lets them instead focus on further advancing the charities.
