As the world is being attacked by the COVID virus, we as a company wanted to be the in the frontline in this battle. We are India’s largest B2B healthcare platform and it adds a lot of responsibility on our shoulders to be a big part of this fight and give the required arsenal our COVID warriors need to battle this pandemic. 

Being a leading player, we started tracking how things were unfolding in China from January’20 onwards. We understood that in a pandemic, when the demand explodes for prevention and protection products, the suppliers struggle to cope with the demand and managing the geographic distribution of demand and supply becomes a big problem in large countries like India. We could envisage that if that happens in India, the whole supply chain infrastructure would get crippled as we had seen the same happening when Chinese government locked down entire Wuhan for months. Going by our learnings from what happened in China and how the pandemic started unfolding in India, we launched the COVID Combat Collaboration Platform, an online platform comprising 3 stronger pillars which support this platform: sellers, who can collaborate and share their available stock; customers, who can share their requirements/demands, and experts, who can contribute on COVID related data which we can rely on to battle this pandemic. And this tracked at geography level so that we are in the best position to manage the discrepancies in demand and supply at the town level. All this is achieved by filling a short and simple online form on our webpage according to the purpose of buying, selling or sharing insights and their data is registered with us. We intimate the buyer or seller as soon as we have a match for the desired demand or supply respectively. This platform is also supported by AI-powered Chatbot to provide reliable information related to COVID.

“The advantage of this platform is that it’s not geographically bound, which implies that buyers and sellers can be connected in metro cities as well as Tier II and III cities. As the demand is already high in most of the urban cities, the next wave is expected from the 

Tier-II and III cities and with the help of this platform we will be able to know and fulfil their requirements” says Vivek Tiwari, Founder & CEO, Medikabazaar.

We have been following the Coronavirus plague directly from when it was breaking out in China and a couple of nations. In our learnings, we understood this is transferable and it will bring disorder and chaos in every nation in no time. Since the breakdown, there were a lot of fake news and material floating in the market and people were unsure of its authenticity. We realized a need for a framework which has only reliable news and products which have come from trusted organisations. The pressing need for medical equipment and supplies like Ventilators, Infrared Thermometers, PPE Kits, Masks, etc. the use of which is more widespread than before with extremely erratic demand-supply patterns across the country led us to create a single-roof platform which enrolls both suppliers and customers of COVID supplies, so we can aggregate accordingly.

Once an individual signs up, our server captures the data and starts matching the demand-supply scenario and gaps across all towns in real-time. 

This platform has helped us get close to ground level realities, difficulties and hurdles caused due to the current crippled supply chain and how we can enhance our ability to fulfil orders efficiently and effectively which otherwise could have been significantly disrupted.

We knew this was needed and we had to execute this project in record time as time was the most important aspect in all of this. Our entire marketing function was on fast-track to execute the early launch of the platform. Speed of execution is the most powerful tool when you are fighting a pandemic like this. 

We are happy to tell you that even though it’s a short time since our launch, this platform has been a big success as we observe that the gap is not widening anymore and we have been immensely benefitted to be able to supply the critical COVID products to our valuable customers and that too without much delays. We have achieved a large number of new suppliers and customers joining our platform who are in sync with our initiative and the cause, to fight this pandemic with everything we have got till it is eradicated.