Aidmatrix SCM: Needs Management

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SCM - Needs Management

Needs Management

The Aidmatrix Network® Needs Management Module is an online application that manages immediate and ongoing product and transportation needs. This application collects, aggregates and communicates those needs more efficiently so those needs can be met. Simply enter your requests for needed items and then publish those needs so donors can supply against them. It automatically integrates with other modules, particularly the in-kind donations management and transportation donations management modules to provide simple end-to-end processing of in-kind products and services.

Proactively Identify and Record Needs
Instead of waiting for random donations to arrive, use this application to proactively log specific product, service and transportation needs. Then you can share those needs in a variety of ways to different audiences that can help fulfill those needs. Simple data entry screens walk you through capturing the specifics so partners know exactly what is being requested without additional inquiry. This includes details like priority and respond-by dates to help manage your needs requests. Pre-set preferences help save you time when entering multiple needs into the system.

Once your needs are entered, you can choose from three powerful publishing options, all with the flexibility to serve your processes:
1. Manually match incoming donations to those needs
2. Publish those needs to other partner portals on the Aidmatrix Network® who may be able to help
3. Auto-publish those needs to your portal

Streamline Matching of Needs with Donations
You can use the system to track the need internally. Then as donations are received, you can manually match them against the need and mark the need as fulfilled.

Selectively Share Needs with Target Partners
In other cases, you may want to publish your needs to other specific partners on the Aidmatrix Network who can help. These partners can choose to view your needs and either fulfill the need from their existing inventory or publish your needs to their audience— thus increasing the likelihood of fulfilling your need. If they publish the need on their portal and a donor makes an offer against it, the system automatically routes the offer directly back to you for review so that it does not impose additional burden on the partner.

Share Needs with the Outside World
Once you log your needs, you can choose to auto-publish those needs to the outside world through your portal. This enables donors to view them, click on the details of the need and make a matching donation offer. You always retain the ability to review donation offers before accepting them. The system also enables you to receive multiple offers on a single needs request. Once you accept an offer, it will automatically remove the need from visibility on your portal, keeping the administration simple.

Email notifications are automatically set up for your subscribing portal administrators to be sent when needs are published to your portal. This enables the "subscribing" portal administrators to become aware of the "published needs" sooner and optimizes the information flow.

Registered donors can choose to customize their view by removing "needs" if they are not interested in them. This streamlines the process of donors reviewing needs by reducing the overall list to display only those that are unviewed or that are of interest to the donor.

Quickly Aggregate Needs On-Demand
This application enables you to quickly and easily report on your overall needs. The real-time reporting aggregates needs so that you can communicate more effectively within your organization and with external audiences. For instance, reporting on “percent of needs met” versus “percent of needs unmet” in particular categories can help educate external audiences on how to make informed donations that really meet the needs of the communities you serve. It can also help you raise awareness and speed up the humanitarian relief donation process.

In addition, needs can be tracked from one portal to another. A referral ID on the donation record enables partnering organizations to track the donations that pass through one partner’s site to another’s so that each can see the original source of the donation.

Overarching Benefits
In the end, the overwhelming benefit of the Aidmatrix Network® and the Needs Management Module is that you can form partnerships that enable you to reach a much broader audience than your regular donor base, thus empowering your mission.