As the brutality of Russia’s aggression on Ukraine continues, and the war continues to grip the country, one of the top priorities for the international community is to ensure that Ukrainian citizens have access to any humanitarian and humanitarian assistance. medically they need. It is a huge challenge to get resources in a country at war, but one organization that is thriving in support of Ukraine is the Blau-Gelbes Kreuz eV (BGK).
The BGK actually started its work in Ukraine when Russia invaded, and then merged, the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. It is true that war has been going on on Ukrainian soil ever since. However, as we all know now, Russia escalated its aggression earlier this year – in large amounts of manpower – and the people of Ukraine continue to defend their regions, towns and cities.
The main focus today of the BGK is to get medical help and assistance to people and hospitals in Ukraine as they continue to fight the war. Since February, the organization has supported the delivery of more than 150 palettes of medical supplies, helping more than 10,000 seriously injured people in Ukraine.
The operation was complicated and required rapid scaling. This week, we found out how Kostya Bazanov, Managing Director and ServiceNow Lead Architect at Teiva Systems Germany GmbH, used his ServiceNow contacts to come up with a platform solution to support the entire supply chain activity. Bazanov has 40 of his own team members in Ukraine, as well as family members, so this is a project very close to home.
Bazanov has volunteered at BGK for several years, but now works closely with the organization, supporting its efforts to obtain medical supplies and assistance in Ukraine. He spoke at ServiceNow’s Knowledge event in The Hague this week, where he explained how the Now platform supports operations.
Bazanov said:
This project started about two months ago. The most affected people are clearly in Ukraine, but it affects us all. It’s not just about the war in Ukraine, it’s affecting people in Europe and around the world.
BGK is a nonprofit-organization from Cologne, founded in 2014. We are committed to delivering humanitarian and medical assistance to Ukraine. When the war in Crimea began, the organization helped with various humanitarian projects, but once the full -scale war began in February this year, we were fully committed to medical assistance.
This support is mainly focused on procuring medical kits from Germany to Poland, to cross the border into Ukraine. Bazanov said;
When the war started, everything was very chaotic. The main target is to bring aid, various types of aid, from Germany to Ukraine. Our team consists of crisis managers, medical experts, air experts, logistics experts. We quickly learned that we needed to provide very focused medical support. We found that we could provide great help by assembling medical kits.
The medical kit is a standardized package of medical supplies. A medical kit fits into a palette, containing approximately 50 medical accessories that will help with most combat injuries.
Approximately 99% of the injured can be rescued or helped by this kit. And then we scaled up from one kit to multiple kits. And to grow, we need a reliable solution to bring this help from Germany, to the hub in Poland, to different regions in Ukraine.
We have been able to provide more than 10 hospitals with our medical supplies and assistance. In one kit you can help more than 100 injured people. We estimate that we have helped more than 10,000 people.
Getting technology support
Bazanov explained that when the team began assembling medical kits in February and March, the work was very unstructured and ‘quite messy’. Everyone is clearly trying their best, but communication is distributed through different platforms and volunteers use different apps on their mobile phones to get information between teams. He said:
They use Telegram, WhatsApp, writing emails, or just calling people and contacts in Ukraine, Germany and Poland. But they don’t have time to sit at a computer and fill out some Excel sheets. So everything is very unstructured.
Because of Bazanov’s work as a ServiceNow consultant, he saw the opportunity to use the platform to digitize the entire process. He said:
My idea is to provide technology to support this process, to make it more digital. I know that because of this manual process, and a few other issues, help can be routed to the wrong targets, or it will take a while.
Also my idea is to introduce ServiceNow as a solution to the whole supply chain process. I have worked at ServiceNow for 12 years as a solutions consultant. I led a team of 40 ServiceNow consultants in Ukraine, so my team was Ukraine, so they were also affected. I know ServiceNow can help, provide value and make the whole process more efficient. It was around the first or second of March.
Bazanov contacted ServiceNow to explain what he wanted to do and he said he received help from the company “within a few hours”. The BGK had to go through some security checks, as is the case for organizations providing support to countries at war, but the first solution went live for a week. Bazanov added:
From the first call to ServiceNow, to be live, is a week. Of course this would not be possible without the passion and dedication of all participants. Along with BGK, the people who actually prepare and ship medical kits, they are in the role of product owners. ServiceNow was involved as a vendor, but also provided professional services along with people dedicated to solution implementation, as well as some development and maintenance activities.
So together in this very unstructured situation, but very flexible and dynamic, we were able to bring this solution within a week. And then we started creating additional features, additional solutions, to bring more value.
Expanding use
Since going live, BGK has begun expanding its ServiceNow tooling capabilities to include humanitarian use cases beyond the digitalization of the distribution of medical kits. Bazanov said:
One of the biggest added value we have provided since then has been for an air rescue initiative of Ukraine. A group of pilots, who fly private jets, or own private jets, they fly medical assistance across Ukraine’s border with Poland. And then the injured also flew back to hospitals in Germany.
Our solution supports this team in planning their flights and pilots, because you need to know which pilots are available where.
We are also expanding, we are bringing more solutions to the ServiceNow platform. We want to implement a good way to prepare documents for the supply chain, for logistics. There are dozens of documents that our organization needs to provide to various authorities in Germany, Poland and Ukraine, and we can speed up this process simply by retrieving all the data from one platform.
BGK continues its incredible work, getting medical help and support in Ukraine, but relies on donations and financial contributions for its work. You can learn more about contributing to the efforts here.
.