US Hurricane Season Began This Month - Prepare Yourself and Your Family

Hurricane Season runs this year from June 1 - November 30th in the United States. You can learn more about preparedness and how to make sure you and your family are ready in case of a hurricane by visiting the NOAA National Hurricane Center website.

Make sure to visit the website of your local state emergency management association, State VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters) or any other disaster preparedness organizations to see if there are any special preparedness tips for your area of the country.

Make sure you know where the local evacuation centers are located, and discuss a plan with your family on what to do in an emergency. Everyone should know the plan by heart.

Make sure you have disaster packs or kits ready to grab on the go. Learn more about what should be in a disaster kit at ready.gov.

In time of crisis your first thought will likely be about reaching your friends and family. And if you’re not directly affected by the emergency, you might be wondering how you can help those in need. In recognition of this, Microsoft, along with Aidmatrix and other nonprofits, has created a mobile application HelpBridge that helps you connect quickly with loved ones during a time of disaster, discover and donate to organizations involved in disaster response work, and find opportunities to volunteer.

See what our partners at Save the Children say about getting your family prepared for an emergency http://bit.ly/1nv6AIQ 

UPS: As World Refugee Day Approaches, a UPSer Recalls Her Visit to Dadaab, the World’s Largest Refugee Camp

A UPSer recently visited Dadaab, Kenya, to visit the world’s largest refugee camp. She describes her experience on a blog on UPS.com, including that she went there to see "how a software tool developed in partnership with CARE and the Aidmatrix Foundation was working." Read her full story below.

by Esther Ndichu | 06 / 18 / 2014 with UPS.

From the air, Dadaab doesn’t appear — it slowly comes into focus. The huge empty expanse of red dust looks like a terracotta platter dotted with pepper. As you draw closer, the black specks grow and change color, and the bare platter fills, resembling a generous helping of githeri, the beans and maize dish that is a Kenyan staple.

Only as you begin your descent does it become clear that this arid expanse of white is actually a vast expanse of tents – row upon row, both man-made and manufactured. An area designed for 90,000 now houses five times that many.


A population of more than 460,000 multi-generational families, a supermarket, bank, school and post office might describe any number of major cities in the world. But this is Dadaab, and Dadaab is not a city. It’s the world’s largest refugee camp, located about 60 miles from Somalia’s border, in Northern Kenya – the country where I born and raised.

I had come here to see for myself how a software tool developed in partnership with CARE and the Aidmatrix Foundation was working. As it turned out, I saw much more.

Spring 2014 Release: Performance Improvements, Asset Management & Distribution New Versions

Aidmatrix Spring 2014 Release Provides Performance Improvement by Moving Platforms to the Microsoft Azure™ Cloud and Delivers New Versions of SCM4Good's Asset Management and Distribution Modules

The Aidmatrix Foundation Inc. today announced its Spring 2014 release of its supply chain software platforms for humanitarian relief. This latest release is currently in production and delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to partnering nonprofits, corporations and government agencies. The entire SCM4Good™ platform and SCM4Hunger™'s Warehouse Management module were upgraded to the Microsoft Azure™ Cloud providing important gains in performance, reliability and redundancy. Other major additions include new versions for SCM4Good™ including Asset Management and Distribution Management. Several of the current modules received key enhancements including: Warehouse Management, Procurement, Fleet Management, and Digital Hub, while platform-level feature such as Offline Mode and Reporting saw significant investment. SCM4Giving™ Needs Management module and NeedsFeed™ both received major upgrades to the user interfaces and further integration into social media sharing. For a full list of enhancements, download the release highlights at www.aidmatrix.org/technology/scm4good.htm.

Moving to the Microsoft Azure™ Cloud - The entire SCM4Good platform and the SCM4Hunger Warehouse Management module moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This provides important gains in performance, reliability, and redundancy. In particular, Microsoft's Content Delivery Network, with nodes in more than 16 countries worldwide, closes the distance for many of our developing country users in terms of Internet geography, and has given noticeable response-time improvements. Nathan Au, Project Manager for FareShare Brighton and Hove noted: "We use Aidmatrix' SCM4Hunger to help receive, warehouse and dispatch food to our hunger agencies every day. We know we run high transaction volumes, especially during peak times each week. When Aidmatrix moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud it was like night and day for us. We saw dramatic performance improvement in response times on average of 4x faster, in some situations it went as high as 10x. It's amazing what a difference running the same application on the Azure Cloud can make. Now we can focus that much more time on getting food to those who are hungry."  

SCM4Good: Asset Management - Puts your global asset registry online. From head office down to the most remote location, all your assets can be tracked and updated, creating a detailed asset database that can be viewed from anywhere. As an integrated component of SCM4Good, the Asset Management module can be used in conjunction with the Procurement and Warehouse Management modules to capture assets flowing through your supply chain, and also with the Fleet Management module to avoid duplication. The Asset Management module incorporates workflows for the reception, tagging, issue, transfer, depreciation and disposal of assets, as well as a full history for each asset.

SCM4Good: Distribution Module - Extends SCM4Good to a true end-to-end SCM system, providing full support for the last-mile of your supply chain between the warehouse and beneficiary. Distribution events enable warehouse inventory to be selected for distribution to target beneficiary demographics, using prescribed ration sizes. Actual distributed quantities and adjustments can be recorded as the distribution unfolds, attaching supporting documents. Existing beneficiary registration systems and data can be accessed by integration through our Digital Hub module.

Funding for enhancements to the Aidmatrix platforms are made possible by grants from UPS, Microsoft, CISCO and others. Additional support is provided by our partners.

Aidmatrix at Health & Humanitarian Logistics Conference in Mexico City

Aidmatrix's Keith Thode is currently attending and speaking at the 2014 Health & Humanitarian Logistics Conference in Mexico City. The conference this year is hosted by Tecnológico de Monterrey and co-organized by Georgia Tech University, INSEAD and MIT. The mission of the conference is to stimulate innovation and build capacity to manage humanitarian supply chains around the world.

Mr. Thode will be speaking on the panel "Infrastructure Needs for Coordination and Collaboration." The goal of this panel is to discuss what underlying infrastructure is needed for the humanitarian actors to be able to collaborate effectively.

Our partners at UPS are also attending the conference, and Gabriel Aparicio, UPS Latin America, Region Solutions Manager will be speaking on the panel "End-to-End Supply Chain Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Response." This panel's goal is to bring together practitioners who deal with designing supply chain strategies from programming to distribution.

Learn more about the conference

Speaker Gabriel Aparicio, UPS Latin America, Region Solutions Manager

Outside the Conference Center

Our partners at UPS have a booth at the conference

Get Help, Give Help During a Disaster - HelpBridge App v2.0 Released

Aidmatrix has partnered with Microsoft and other nonprofit organizations to help power the HelpBridge app. HelpBridge is designed to help people connect during disasters. It even provides volunteer and donation opportunities.

Read about the new v2.0 launch on Microsoft Corporate Citizenship's website:

In time of crisis your first thought will likely be about reaching your friends and family. And if you’re not directly affected by the emergency, you might be wondering how you can help those in need.

In recognition of this, Microsoft has created a mobile application that helps you connect quickly with loved ones during a time of disaster, discover and donate to organizations involved in disaster response work, and find opportunities to volunteer.

HelpBridge is powered by Windows Azure and our partners – Aidmatrix, GuideStar, Mobile Giving Foundation, Network for Good and VolunteerMatch. And it’s available for free on Windows Phone, Android and iOS mobile operating systems.

Download HelpBridge today