Rx Product Marketplace Orchestrator

Faced with serious challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare organizations can suffer shortages of critical materials and products due to the lack of robust supply chains. Additionally, such crises expose gaps in product design and manufacturing expertise.

The Rx Product Marketplace Orchestrator will provide:

• A continuously operating centralized system allowing consumers to dispatch emergency work orders to manufacturers throughout the United States. Order tracking and fulfillment would be managed in a transparent, timely manner.
• A way for consumers and producers to manage supply and demand requirements, avoiding failures by accounting for manufacturing capabilities (e.g., volume, speed, and location).
• A system to integrate capabilities for designing and manufacturing emergency-response goods via search-engine-like interfaces and automatic consumer and producer matchmaking. This would be based on uniform specifications.
• A solution for knowledge-sharing, capacity utilization, and load-balancing among participating producers.
• A method to reduce manufacturers’ barriers to changing operations during emergencies to enable fulfillment of new orders. This would account for the changes manufacturers could face in an emergency situation, including fluctuations in the number of employees and reduced capacity due to safety protocols.
• A system to collect decentralized manufacturing data to be used by consumers, producers, or third-party organizations such as government agencies or nonprofits.

The Rx Product Marketplace Orchestrator is expected to improve the emergency preparedness and response of the U.S. advanced manufacturing industry.