Case Study - Voluntary Services Aberdeen

Keeping track of PPE supplies is crucial for many organisations in the fight against Covid-19 especially charities like Aberdeen social care charity VSA. It supports over 20,000 vulnerable people, many of them in care homes, in 22 locations across the North-east of Scotland. When the pandemic struck, the VSA’s Deputy Chief Executive, John Booth, realised that their Health and Safety Manager would need more than an Excel spreadsheet to manage the distribution of supplies to meet the increased demand for PPE across their various sites.

‘Our existing process is very labour intensive and takes up a lot of time. Although the details of the products and the stock levels on each site are manually updated on a spreadsheet there’s always the worry that a simple miscalculation could lead to a shortage of PPE. So we asked the Scottish Tech Army if they could come up with a simpler and more reliable inventory system for us to use.’

The Scottish Tech Army’s volunteer Project Manager Andrew Rendle, quickly put a team together to assess various inventory management systems.

‘We decided to go with a cloud-hosted off the shelf application that would not only meet VSA’s short-term needs but could be expanded and integrated into some of their other systems in future phases. This meant we could configure and test an existing package for VSA that was flexible and future proof. We were also keen to come up with a digital inventory management system that other charities could adopt to help save them time and money.’

For Booth, getting an online system in place has not only freed up their manager’s time to focus on other things, but has reassured VSA that it has the equipment it needs to protect its staff and the vulnerable people in its care.

‘Looking after the PPE across our different sites is a big task, especially as we don’t know how long the after-effects of this crisis will go on for. What’s great about the system the Scottish Tech Army has set up is that it could be used by care providers up and down the country so that other charities and care companies might also benefit from this project.’