Whenever tragedy strikes there are people who run towards it to help. So when the war in Ukraine started, the Blue-Yellow Cross, Blau-Gelbes Kreuz (BGK) sprang into action. The small charity's focus is to provide humanitarian aid to communities in need, but the scale of this new challenge was something the volunteers had never seen before.

The reality is that providing aid involves more than good hearts and generosity. It requires connecting all the moving parts automatically and productively, ensuring that help reaches those who need it and that it's allowed to cross the border to begin with.

Starting with the basics

BGK is a German nonprofit organisation that, since the war's outbreak, has implemented many initiatives to provide much-needed aid to Ukrainians, particularly children, internally displaced persons, the injured and others across the region.

BGK had only 24 volunteers when the war started, so it was difficult to manage the demands of providing humanitarian aid on such a large scale. "At first, it was super chaotic", says Oleksii Makarenko, Chief Information Officer at BGK. "There was absolutely zero IT infrastructure. And we didn't know what was going on, how long the war would last, and if we'd be able to support an IT infrastructure at all".

Setting things up for scalability

Oleksii's first main challenge started with the documentation necessary for aid lorries to cross the border. This included up to eight documents per border crossing where a single error could jeopardise the transport. "It was a total mess", says Oleksii.

This urgent need for a suddenly expanding charity made Oleksii realise that BGK required a solid platform that could help him and his team find efficient answers to various new challenges. With the help of partner, Teiva Systems, and ServiceNow employees donating their time, the ServiceNow AI platform was implemented to support the development of new solutions for increasingly pressing and expanding problems.

After all, the organisation quickly grew from €20,000 of donations per year to €10 million, and managing this kind of money and the increasing number of volunteers meant that greater efficiency was needed each day. One of the ways to achieve this was to centralise requests for aid into one hub that's designed to grow seamlessly with the charity.

One platform for productively managing requests

Each region of Ukraine has a BGK volunteer assigned to it, gathering information and collating needs. This was complex, slow and often confusing because requests came in from all directions and went out to everyone in the organisation.

With ServiceNow, BGK was able to integrate requests for medication from WhatsApp, Telegram, phone calls, text messages, emails and even letters into a single platform. This approach was then implemented in other BGK initiatives, enabling automation and streamlining to ultimately result in better productivity and smarter work by allowing volunteers to optimise their efforts and resolve issues more quickly.

Thanks to the low-code approach, simplicity leads the way and Oleksii believes that "the ServiceNow portal made life much, much simpler for everyone".

Babies won't wait

BGK sends boxes of up to 60 different items that fulfil the needs of newborns and their mothers for the first four weeks of the baby's life.

Every box has an ID number and a QR code, generated by ServiceNow, that mothers can scan. These not only help to track the boxes but also allow the mothers to send messages back to BGK. "It's one of the most heart-warming projects", says Oleksii. "They write such amazing messages to us and it's one of the nicest things that ServiceNow enabled us to see and have".

Hope amid war

1,800 boxes of baby supplies have been sent to date and although the funding is lower than before, BGK is determined to keep this project going. It brings a special kind of light to a terrifyingly dark place. "We always say that children don't have pause buttons, and we named this part of our children's programme 'Hope'", says Oleksii. "There is so much destruction and so many people killed, but this is one of the areas where we can actually give hope to the children that are coming into this world".

Making sure the aid reaches its destination

One of the other impactful projects made possible by intelligence from the ServiceNow platform was the med kit programme. Each kit contained a pallet of up to 140 different medicines and medical products worth €15,000. But ensuring they reached the right people was a problem.

"We had no way of knowing what happened to the med kits after we delivered them to the aid hubs", says Oleksii. "ServiceNow helped us develop a way of tracking the pallets with the right IT infrastructure".

Centralising the information and supporting tracking capabilities by leveraging the platform's embedded intelligence allowed BGK to send the kits to specific hospitals. This ensured that the aid reached the right people and protected the cargo from potential theft.

"Even if a hospital was bombed, even if everything inside was looted, which was often the case when the Russian forces were retreating, the hospital personnel could still try to save people and help their patients."  

You can't quantify the impact of aid

How many people has BGK helped to date? One rescue backpack for a field medic can save up to five lives and 3,000 have been sent to date. One generator, depending on the size, can help a family or a whole school, and BGK has sent 6,500 of them throughout Ukraine so far. How many people will a lorry full of hospital beds help? How many lives have been affected?

While it's hard to quantify the impact, Oleksii believes that, with optimisation and efficiency, BGK is more effective and agile in its mission to get aid where it is needed most while supporting continued growth. The organisation can now rely on consistency and scalability of processes as well as data integrity as its basis for growth. 

"We're going just as fast and our deliveries have become even larger", he says. "We're still as effective, but we are utilising fewer resources. With ServiceNow and the tools we develop, we have been able to improve all areas without needing to slow down".

Always trying to get more done

BGK is collaborating with ServiceNow to automate even further. This includes designing ways to make it easier for people to confirm they've received aid by uploading photos and documents related to the delivery. The nonprofit also wants to build integrations between ServiceNow and its document-generating system as well as automate its communications with organisations that request and receive help. Automating the enterprise at scale will allow for breaking down barriers between processes and systems further, allowing for even more connected digital workflows across the enterprise.

In essence, BGK wants to keep working with ServiceNow because it enables its volunteers to run towards a tragedy to offer help and make a difference. "I can't imagine a platform on which we would be able to make a better solution", concludes Oleksii. "If ServiceNow hadn't come to us, it would cost us an insane amount of money and resources to develop our tools a different way. And it seems like the longer we're working with it, the better it becomes".