HeiGIT Product Manager for Smart Mobility Julian Psotta attended this year’s Global Health Supply Chain Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The main goal of the GHSCS 2023 was to learn and share experiences from people directly working on issues related to this year’s theme: “Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains for Equitable Access to Healthcare”. From November 13st to 16th, experts from several fields, like representatives of government, industry and civil society, as well as academics, NGOs and donors, discussed topics like various forms of self-reliance, financing and governance to create an enabling environment, or development of regional manufacturing and local suppliers.
Julian participated in the panel discussion “Using Data Analytics to Drive Decision Making and Improve Resiliency in Last Mile Distribution” where the attendees discussed the growth and increasing complexity of supply chains as well as the correlating need to improve flexibility and efficiency in last mile distribution. In his presentation “Openrouteservice (ORS) – Open-Source Routing & Optimization” Julian discussed the use of open-data and open-source software to support self-reliant, independent, and sustainable supply chains. ORS is a tool that utilizes user-generated and collaboratively collected free geographic data from OpenStreetMap to provide different global spatial services, such as measuring reachability and generating optimized routes, which Julian explained in his presentation. Such features make ORS a beneficial tool for building and maintaining supply routes and optimizing last mile distribution. Tools like ORS highlight the advantageousness and importance of easily accessible free data in all fields related to routing.
In the name of Julian and the team at HeiGIT, we would like to thank all organizers and participants for making the GHSCS 2023 such a fun and insightful event!