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Prague, 29.09.2021 | Companies that are successful in their business and manage to respond to new market conditions in a timely manner usually have at least one thing in common: they are constantly innovating. In the 22nd annual Microsoft Awards, the judges selected the 22 most innovative from hundreds of nominated projects that have contributed to the interconnection of people, data and processes. The prestigious competition recognizes interesting and functional digital solutions to client problems from Microsoft partners in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while also providing inspiration for other partners and customers.
In the Community Response Award category, the winner of the Microsoft Awards 2021 was the company ALVAO with its project/solution . EMS SK Operational Centre asset management and internal services digitization.
The project
The Emergency Medical Service Operational Centre is a unique type of medical facility. It brings together hundreds of emergency response teams spread all over the Slovak Republic and manages the emergency line. They have 8 regional operation centres under their administration and currently manage and coordinate activities for a fleet of 321 ground ambulances and 7 helicopters.
Bef
ore the project started, the Operational Centre was faced with a large number of requests that were made by staff to the department by phone or email. It was very difficult to keep track of the work of the IT team. Another problem was the large amount of IT and rescue equipment that the team needed to keep track of.
The scope of the project included a system to reference assets (ALVAO Asset Management) and a system to monitor access to the service (ALVAO Service Desk). The aim was to provide full support for the rescue team, so the workers could easily report any fault directly from the vehicle, or find out the condition of the equipment they were using. They chose the Microsoft platform for the Operations Centre digitization process. The solution was deployed in the cloud (Microsoft Azure SaaS) so the customer had enough time for strategic tasks and did not have to worry about infrastructure.
The possibility to connect to the system from anywhere was appreciated by the Centre staff, especially last year when the vehicles and equipment were at maximum capacity. The interconnectivity of the two ALVAO products significantly accelerated the operation of the entire department. The introduction of an efficient defect tracking system has reduced the time to resolve requests from one to three months to a maximum of one week. Annual inventory has also been greatly simplified. The web-based inventory system was able to reduce the inventory from several weeks to a few days, as the approval of allocated assets via email solved the problem of a large number of branches and equipment “on the move”.
“During the digitization process, we have primarily focused on the assets we provide to rescuers on the field. In ambulances, we address navigation via smartphones. Due to a large number of locations, installation and tracking down assets are quite challenging. The navigation systems in particular are very fault-tolerant, their lifespan depends on the weather, and it was very important for us to keep track of which ones are under warranty and which ones are no longer. Thanks to Asset Management, we are able to record this data accurately and then react flexibly to situations that arise,” comments Marián Podmajerský, Head of the Information and Communication Technologies Department of the Operational Centre of the EMS SK.
Microsoft Awards 2021
This year, 304 nominations were received in 10 core categories and two overlapping categories. These nominations included 124 completely distinctive solutions from the fields of healthcare, finance, retail, public administration, and education. In the overlapping category of the SMB Innovation Award, the judges focused on projects for small and medium-sized businesses. They are a key part of the Czech economy and labour market.
Many of the award-winning projects have enabled clients to respond quickly and flexibly to the challenges of recent months. More often than in the past, digital solutions have focused on improving customer relationships, hybrid work models, increasing process efficiency and communication.
“In the past year, a number of companies and organizations have decided to switch to a hybrid working mode, combining office and home working. This often created a need for change in management, core processes, and the company culture itself. Our partners, therefore, focused on making tools available for communication, collaboration, remote access, as well as effective security of corporate data in the new work mode. Innovative projects using the cloud not only helped in the area of online work and communication but also enabled our customers to fundamentally modernize their own products and services,” explains Martin Hruška, Microsoft Czech Republic and Slovakia Partner Ecosystem Director.
READ THE CASE STUDY: The Slovak Emergency Medical Rescue Service Operational Centre is digitizing its rescue services support, with ALVAO help