SA Fighting Covid – A JV with 3DPSA
Sector Non-profit / Engineering
Project SA Fighting COVID

SA Fighting COVID mobilised the South African 3D printing community by giving support in printing face shield frames, which were assembled into a complete Face Shield and sent for free to frontline workers.
South Africa Fighting COVID is a non-profit initiative that started at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, when hospitals were struggling to provide their staff with Personal Protection Equipment to prevent virus contamination. Coincidentally, Haefele’s team is made up of a number of 3D printing enthusiasts and as part of Haefele’s internal program “PLAY”, a few teammembers were already embarking on the 3D printing and robotics


The Haefele team got involved in various instances.
1 – By supplying 3D printers to their team members, so they could help print face shields while in lockdown.
2 – Project managing the logistics involved in collecting, sanitising, and distributing the shields.
3 – Developing an online portal where all requests could be handled and tracked.
The platform connected printers, distributors, and end-users by using multi-way communication. Through the platform, government hospitals, clinics & medical staff could send their requests for shields and printers could inform them how many shields were available for collection. The team involved in logistics also had visibility over the orders, so they could arrange collection, the delivery of materials to and from printers, sanitisation and finally distribution to the end users.



01
Manually managing high volume
02
Difficult tracking
03
No available resources
- Record time
- Over 18,000 shields and counting
- Over 90 requests and counting
- 82 supporting 3D printers
- Over 80 portal users.
- Over 80 users
- Haefele team members offering their time


Application
Infrastructure
Depending on the phase of the project
Software development
2 developers
1 part-time tester
1 part-time Business Analyst
1 UX Designer
Distribution & Logistics
2 volunteering team members
3D Printing
6 Haefele team members
