Relief For Nonprofit Supply Chains

Computerworld - Back in 2000, Jan Pruitt, CEO of the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas, was well aware that she was having problems with the agency's supply management system. But she also knew that she didn't have the resources to buy and manage commercial software to correct the inefficiencies.

"We knew it was out of our budget," says Pruitt. "We don't spend money on those things when we can spend our money on a tractor-trailer full of peanut butter."

Her dilemma didn't go unnoticed.

In fact, the food bank's supply system would become the proving ground for a new idea being developed across town. That same year, the nonprofit Aidmatrix Foundation Inc., also based in Dallas, was just getting off the ground.

An offshoot of i2 Technologies Inc., a for-profit maker of supply chain management technology, Aidmatrix had a goal to develop Internet-based software to help humanitarian organizations better manage their supplies. It all began when a new i2 employee who had worked with relief efforts in war-torn Kosovo e-mailed the company's president and founder, Sanjiv Sidhu, alerting him that i2's products could have a significant effect on relief work.

Sidhu decided to work with an employee charitable organization, the i2Foundation, to develop the idea. Foundation members picked the North Texas Food Bank to test the concept, says Keith R. Thode, Aidmatrix's chief operating officer.

Working with unlimited licenses for i2's TradeMatrix platform, foundation workers built the Online Agency Ordering program for the North Texas Food Bank, which went live with it in 2001. The system allows the homeless shelters, women's shelters, after-school programs and food pantries that get supplies from the food bank to view inventory lists and order online.

"The technology and the willingness of Aidmatrix is making food banking an entirely different industry than it would have been," Pruitt says.

The cost of getting that first system up was about $1 million, excluding the value of the donated licenses, Thode says. The i2Foundation and the group's founder and CEO, Lekha Singh, underwrote the cost.

Keith R. Thode, Aidmatrix's COO (left), and former Wisconsin Governor and Aidmatrix President and CEO Scott McCallum

"This kind of technology can really increase the greater good," says Mark Hillman, a senior research analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston.

Filling an Urgent Need