Hackathon 4Good Delivers Innovative Solutions for NetSuite.org’s Charity Partners

Before the keynotes, the parties, and the deep-dive product sessions at SuiteWorld 2015 took place, something a little smaller but just as important happened.

Fifty volunteer NetSuite developers and programmers, customers, and partners got together to develop custom cloud solutions for charity partners Good360 and Found Animals Foundation as part of NetSuite.org’s second annual Hackathon 4Good.

Participants were divided into teams of four and spent the next nine hours strategizing, planning, coding and developing their solutions. Leveraging the SuiteCloud Development Platform, the teams were able to strategically design applications to enable the organizations to do their good work better.

“As we only had a few hours to brainstorm possible solutions, the team threw all of the options on the table and picked the best ones,” said Johanne Lim, a NetSuite Product Manager in the Philippines of his team’s process to decide how they would develop a solution for charity partner Good360.

At the end of the day, teams presented their solution to a panel of judges which included NetSuite Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Evan Goldberg, NetSuite EVP of Product Management Gary Wiessinger, NetSuite.org Senior Director of Nonprofit David Geilhufe and representatives from the charity partners.

Hackathon 4Good participants coding for Good360, a nonprofit that leverages NetSuite to connect companies that want to donate products with charities that need them, were asked to develop a solution that could help manage massive spikes in donated goods and warehouse locations during disaster situations.

“We came up with a solution that made use of NetSuite’s native enterprise social collaboration tool (SuiteSocial) so users could communicate in the context of records, a mapping tool to visually render locations and deliveries in context of the disaster area, a records visualization tool giving users a complete view of all related records and transactions, and some nifty customizations applied to standard NetSuite forms, giving the disaster relief coordinator a unified interface to perform their work,” said Lim.

For Found Animals, a nonprofit dedicated to animal well-being through rescue, responsible adoption initiatives, and low-cost spay and neuter programs, Hackathon 4Good participants were asked to develop a solution that could enable them to use NetSuite to scale their pet microchip program. The organization’s goal is to issue millions of microchips to those in need.

After a very difficult judging round, the judges selected the application built by Lim’s team mT Landfills’ for Good360 and the application built by SuiteAvengers for Found Animals as the winners!

As part of the mT Landfill team, Lim says that winning the competition was “exciting, challenging, and overall felt great.”

Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s event. Our charity partners were thrilled to see each participant’s commitment to helping them meet their business challenges. Learn more about all the great NetSuite.org initiatives at www.netsuite.org.