Efficient logistics are critical to ensuring that medicines and medical supplies reach health facilities on time. Many health systems struggle with visibility on vehicle usage, delivery patterns, and overall supply chain efficiency. IASO’s entities and workflow features provide a powerful and flexible solution to track and optimize the distribution of medical and pharmaceutical products.
With IASO, key logistics elements—such as vehicles, drivers, pharmacies, and health facilities—can be digitally managed in a structured way. Each entity is linked to a workflow that allows real-time tracking and reporting at different levels of the supply chain.
Entities and workflows were released in IASO in the framework of a project digitalizing nutritional programmes for under or malnourished children under 5 and pregnant or breastfeeding women for a UN agency. But they can be used for many other use cases as they enable the recording in IASO of individuals, but also items that can move from a geographic point to another. So why not using it for vehicules transporting and delivering medical or pharmaceutical products?
Workflows are linked to entities, and they allow users to define a set of forms that should open depending on a previous form’s answers provided. These are therefore very handy to record “events” for logistics management. For instance, after a vehicle is recorded into the system, different events can be declared, such as a delivery, or a vehicle maintenance, or a stop to fill the tank.
In the below demo of IASO for logistics, you can see an example of the registration of a new vehicle, with its number plate, vehicle type and other key data to uniquely identify this vehicle. Then, IASO has been parametered to allow users to select an event, and according to each event, a series of questions are being asked.
For example, if a delivery happened, the question will be about the date and time of delivery, as well on the quantities delivery for each product.
The IASO web application allows to check the last events that happened for each vehicule:
It is then possible to create a dashboard to track in real-time the vehicles’ activities, including their geographic updates.
By leveraging IASO’s workflow automation, health authorities can gain greater transparency and efficiency in last-mile distribution. Whether it’s tracking vehicle usage, ensuring timely deliveries, or managing logistics at scale, IASO offers a scalable and adaptable approach to optimizing supply chains.
