Supply Dynamics, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N204-A02

Description

The Navy has identified the need for improved logistics support to ensure sailors receive the best medical care available as promptly as possible.  To meet such a standard, Supply Dynamics and its partners have proposed a Digital Logistics solution for medical care (DLS) that knits together 5 best in class, commercially proven technologies to meet these requirements. In order to quickly (within 5 months) deliver an integrated DLS prototype solution, ours will be hosted on an existing machine learning enabled, multi-enterprise/multi-tier supply chain collaboration platform called SDX.  Our DLS incorporates more than sophisticated technology or the ability to scrape web sites and product catalogues to map a hypothetical supply chain of possible suppliers and subcontractors for medical equipment, supplies and care.  It is designed and developed to address challenges that are far more complex and nuanced.  This is where the collective expertise of our team, informed by years of actual experience in managing end-to-end supply chains, monitoring medical supply chain risks, and handling electronic medical records across a vast network of hospitals, comes into play. Our DLS solution for Medical Care will demonstrate in Phase 1 not Phase 3, the ability to: Quickly and easily map, and validate medical equipment, supplies and constituent parts, ingredients, and suppliers (tier 1- tier n) and keep them up-to-date and accurate over time. Transform “unstructured” data from multiple independent sources (data that fails to conform to a heterogenous naming convention and data taxonomy) into a usable corpus of reliable “structured data” that can then support real-time, DON analytics and decision making.  This is a foundational capability that will ensure that this project does not fall victim to frequently encountered “garbage in-garbage-out” scenarios that often plague projects of this nature.  Rank and approve certain suppliers based on their location, ownership, country of origin, credit rating, and n-tier dependencies. keep information (about suppliers, equipment, supplies, inventory levels, etc.) up-to date and accurate over time and without significant manual intervention. This ability to authenticate material and product flow  and where possible, automate them, is essential because BOM data for medical equipment and supplies, like other information already managed in our core platform, ages quickly due to such things as: new part introductions, engineering/design changes, source selection changes, expiration dates, and end of life (EOL) considerations.  Without this capability, timely use and/or destruction of supplies with limited shelf life could make matters worse, not better.  Because these capabilities come “out of the box” in the core platform, it means that vital resources in Phases 1 and any that follow, will be laser focused on ways to elegantly combine the valuable capabilities of project partners and meet DON reporting requirements.