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REGION:
Latin America & Sub-Saharan Africa
INDUSTRY:
Construction
Bridges to Prosperity envisions a world where poverty caused by rural isolation no longer exists. The organization works with local communities, partners and foundations to construct footbridges that connect residents to education, health care and economic opportunity. An estimated “900 million rural dwellers worldwide do not have adequate access to the formal transport system,” according to The World Bank Group. B2P has built over 280 footbridges that serve more than 1 million people in 21 countries.
The B2P team is working to to scale their impact from hundreds to thousands of bridges and improve operations in areas of the world where tough terrain and spotty mobile phone connectivity prevent easy solutions. One obstacle was Bridges to Prosperity’s legacy paper process for managing footbridge site assessment, construction and maintenance, which the organization sought to digitize to better serve their team as it grew in size and was dispersed to far flung locations.
Any new construction management setup also had to include an integrated database and project management system, allow for mobile data collection and provide real-time reporting and analysis. It was equally important for the construction project database to seamlessly connect with B2P’s existing Salesforce database, which they were already using to track fundraising contributions to fund footbridge construction. Finally, any new system had to be user-friendly, “out-of-the-box” but customizable when necessary, applicable across multiple geographies, affordable and scalable.
“[TaroWorks] has really been a game changer for our organization in terms of how we make decisions. … When you make data available in forms like this it really empowers staff all over the world and at all levels to make decisions and generate ideas about how we can work better and more efficiently.”
Abbie Noriega, Chief Impact Officer
Rather than build a customized construction management system from scratch, Bridges to Prosperity saved more than $100,000 by developing an offline footbridge construction management platform using TaroWorks and two other off-the-shelf products from the Salesforce AppExchange - one providing SMS to survey communities around potential bridge sites and the other to handle project management from the cloud. Bridges to Prosperity uses TaroWorks’ offline mobile app to collect field data needed for assessing a new footbridge project’s viability and to manage and direct field staff working to collect that data in areas with limited internet or mobile phone access.
The information analyzed using TaroWorks and Salesforce also provides current status on the number of remote locations Bridges to Prosperity field agents have assessed as possible future footbridge sites, helps determine which projects are the strongest candidates to move forward, and gauges how productive the field team has been in logging this data. (Read More)
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