City of Milan improves delivery of medical supplies in crisis with DXC and ServiceNow

As northern Italy was hit hard by COVID-19 in March 2020, much-needed emergency medical supplies were not reaching hospitals and doctors in an efficient manner, if at all. An estimated 9 to 11 percent of COVID-19 patients needed intensive care, pushing many hospitals to maximum capacity and creating shortages of ventilators and personal protective equipment. The City of Milan’s Civil Protection Department desperately needed to improve the tracking and distribution of essential equipment to medical facilities in the region.

Custom solution delivered in days

Stefano Marcon, project manager for the City of Milan, says, “At the very beginning, everything was tracked with the help of basic spreadsheets.” This manual approach was highly inefficient and provided almost no control of stockrooms.

“Missing data and incomplete or unreliable information could seriously compromise our operations,” Marcon adds.

Working in collaboration with the City of Milan and ServiceNow, DXC developed and implemented a custom ServiceNow solution to track and manage the receipt and distribution of emergency medical items such as masks, gloves, protective suits, thermometers and ventilators. Given the urgency of the situation, the team worked around the clock. The solution went live in just 6 days.

The team took an existing ServiceNow instance and developed a custom configuration that was tailor-made to fit the city’s emergency procurement environment. The system closely monitors the receipt of materials arriving in warehouses and tracks shipments as they are sent to recipients. All medical items are now tracked step-by-step much more efficiently.

Manlio Torchia, DXC account delivery leader for the North Italy public sector, says, “Working with ServiceNow, DXC was able to implement the customization that was required. We were able to track the movement of all the equipment from starting point to delivery.”

Working amid a crisis

The project team worked on the application amid a quickly growing health emergency. “We were in a crisis, so the timing was very important,” says Alessandro Zamperioli, a Milan-based IT service delivery manager at DXC. “Milan and northern Italy had the biggest number of cases, so everyone was pushing hard to do their best. It was tough for us, but we really supported each other.

“Distribution was made easy and trackable,” Marcon says. “Through the application, the staff working in the warehouse had the exact information needed to prepare the equipment for shipment.”

Once the system was up and running, the team made tweaks and improvements to the application each day. Marcon says a clear picture of the current status of medical equipment has become available to all stakeholders in real time.

“Specific dashboards speeded up the procurement process in order to guarantee that purchases were aligned to emergency needs,” he says.

The ServiceNow reporting capabilities help the city identify what items are being received, what is stored in warehouses and what is being delivered. Reports are automatically generated that allow managers to track the movement of materials and make decisions of where equipment should be sent. In addition, warehouse workers can access the system on multiple devices through a custom web interface.

Making a difference

Helping the citizens of northern Italy by fighting the COVID-19 crisis and effectively serving the customer provided tremendous motivation for the development team, Torchia says.

“This was a big crisis, so everyone was committed,” he says. “Everyone on the team felt that if we can help, we will do it.”

Marcon is deeply proud of the teamwork and collaboration between his municipality and the two private sector technology companies. The application is scalable, and the City of Milan is considering extending it to other uses, such as delivering food to people in need, he adds.

“The team was fully committed and implemented a solution in a very short time. The quality of the solution also led to very fast adoption by the Civil Protection Department,” Marcon says.