It’s a huge challenge for an organisation the size of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to keep track of goods and supplies at any given time. Every day, thousands of tons of WFP food are on the move – delivered to refugee camps and distribution points, being stored in remote warehouses or crossing the ocean on WFP-chartered ships. Excellent communication facilities are needed to oversee and monitor such massive amounts of food. The communications need to link up to even the most remote WFP sub-offices.

 

TNT and our IT partner, Ordina, have now completed the Commodity Tracking project which makes the WFP tracking processes and information systems more efficient and more reliable, and improves the clarity of its overviews and the presentation of data. One of the project’s main goals was to optimise WFP’s COMPAS system. COMPAS (Commodity Movement Processing and Analysis System) allows the agency to track food commodities from their arrival at WFP warehouses and depots right up to distribution points for those in need.

 

COMPAS provides an instant up-to-date snapshot of commodity stocks and has tools to deal with any type of crisis scenario. It is a global system that reflects all movements of food throughout the WFP system. A TNT study showed COMPAS could work as an online centralised system to determine the location of stocks and commodities, to WFP staff across the world, in almost real-time. Implementation of the system would lead to cost savings and more efficient distribution information for WFP.