Background
Mending Kids provides free life-saving surgeries to children who can't afford them across the world. They deploy volunteer surgeons, medical staff, and surgical supplies to regions in need, as well as fly children to the United States for advanced clinical care.
The Problem
Currently, Mending Kids manages tens of thousands of donated medical supplies using a manual, error-prone spreadsheet. This system is often managed by a rotating intern, leading to data inconsistencies and a loss of institutional knowledge each quarter.
"High-volume donations with limited shelf-life expire on the shelf because they are not tracked effectively, leading to significant supply waste."
Operational Inefficiency
Staff and volunteers spend valuable hours valuing items manually for audits, categorizing unsolicited supplies for specific surgical missions (e.g., cardiac vs. plastics), and generating custom manifests for international customs shipments.
Audit & Compliance Risk
The spreadsheet system makes it extremely difficult to quickly locate high-value items during an audit and provide the necessary proof of valuation (e.g., receipts or screenshots), creating a significant regulatory risk.
Improperly Supplied Missions
Surgical teams risk traveling to international missions without essential items because tracking supply locations, packaging, and specific counts across multiple warehouses is extremely difficult.
The Solution
The Mending Kids Inventory Management System centralizes the tracking and management of donated medical supplies. It replaces a manual spreadsheet-based workflow with a structured digital system that improves visibility, reduces waste, and streamlines operational processes such as audits, mission preparation, and customs documentation.
The platform enables staff to log, categorize, search, and manage inventory from donation intake through mission deployment. It also provides alerts for expiring items, stores valuation documentation, and generates reports required for audits and international shipments.
System Architecture & Key Features
I designed a comprehensive, role-based platform that translates complex inventory logic into simple, actionable screens for non-expert staff and interns.
● 1. Centralized Dashboard
Acts as the primary anchor for users, providing low-stock alerts for critical supplies, highlights of items nearing expiration, ongoing and upcoming mission summaries, and a live activity feed.
● 2. Inventory Management
The core data grid. Each supply record includes Name, Description, Manufacturing Company, Reference Number, Quantity, Location, and Expiration Date. Items can be categorized dynamically as Available, In Use, or Archived.
● 3. Mission Planning & Sorting
Missions are sorted by specialty and location. Each mission file links directly to required supply lists, lead doctor's contact details, budgets, and assigned team members.
● 4. Valuation & Audit Records
Each record contains estimated market value fields, source links, and attachments for receipts. This eliminates administrative stress during annual financial compliance audits.
● 5. Granular Permissions
Interns are granted intake and logging access, while full admins hold oversight to approve shipments, modify valuation fields, and export customs manifests.
Usability Testing & Insights
We tested the initial system with non-expert demographics (average familiarity score of 2.9/5) to evaluate if interns and volunteers could operate the interface autonomously under high-velocity donation intakes.
Subjective Usability Rating
Users reported an average subjective task ease of 3.1/5 on their first trial, indicating successful abstraction of complex relational databases into a flat, readable component system.
High-Velocity Dashboard Alignment
81.8% of users demonstrated immediate mental-model alignment with our central Dashboard layout, choosing to anchor all expiration and low-stock filters from the dashboard charts.
Autonomous Power-User Adoption
25.9% of testers independently discovered and utilized advanced contextual shortcuts to merge creation and assignment loops, cutting down total creation time by half.
Client Feedback
Quotes gathered from our Zoom feedback sessions and user testing runs with the Mending Kids leadership and staff:
"This is a much more streamlined process... I think there are just less steps, which makes total sense."
"I liked how I had the upcoming expired products and upcoming missions visible right at the front."
"It's way better than what we are working with now, for sure."