Vitalliance is pleased to announce the appointment of David Crewe-Brown as General Manager, and Wesley Brown as Product Manager: OpenLMIS Project, effective 1 August 2021.

Vitalliance offers comprehensive technology and business solutions for pharmaceutical supply chains and humanitarian aid organizations. The company was recently appointed as steward of the OpenLMIS platform – a leading electronic logistics management information system (LMIS) purpose-built to manage public health supply chains in low- and middle-income countries, including Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

David Crewe-Brown

In his new role, David will be responsible for the general management of Vitalliance, focusing on growing its value chain service offering into the African market, as well as ensuring that the OpenLMIS offering is maintained and expanded across the continent and further afield.

“I would like to see Vitalliance become a trusted partner in healthcare and humanitarian supply chain across the African continent,” says David. “One of our goals is the establishment of an African Support Centre offering supply chain solutions to Ministries of Health, suppliers, private sector firms and donors. Along with my team, I would like to position Vitalliance to be the partner of choice to see a transformation of supply chains to ultimately meet patient needs and save people’s lives.”

Part of Vitalliance’s stewardship of OpenLMIS means ensuring that the platform becomes a trusted system for stock management. “I would like to see the functionality expand to support the needs of the community using the system to health commodity supply chains,” says David. “Our focus is to enable countries to manage their health supply chains more effectively to support improved healthcare for all.”

David is a professional Industrial Engineer and has gained extensive experience in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) Supply Chain Management and Planning in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique.

David joins Vitalliance from Guidehouse, where he has spent the past four years consulting on a USAID funded project, ‘Supply Chain Redesign for the South African National Department of Health (NDoH)’. He was responsible for optimising the pharmaceutical supply chain of the NDoH, and the project’s scope included demand, supply and distribution planning.

David held various senior supply chain roles during his twenty-year tenure at SABMiller prior to joining Guidehouse. In his last role at SABMiller, David was responsible for setting up a centralized planning team for the rest of Africa.

Wesley Brown

Wesley joins Vitalliance as Product Manager responsible for the continued advancement of the OpenLMIS project. “This includes the coordination of the various partner organizations, the broader OpenLMIS community, and the technical teams responsible for building and maintaining the software platform,” he says.

Wesley has a strong background in designing and building software solutions and managing software development teams. Most recently, Wesley has worked in the healthcare IT space for health systems and institutions in low-resource settings. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya with his wife and daughter.

Wesley sees the key vision for OpenLMIS as unlocking financial sustainability while continuing to support the open source community, as well as expanding its partner organization network and overall impact.

“Like many development-funded spaces, technical solutions in the health space tend to be siloed, and lacking in a holistic approach to solution development,” says Wesley. He believes that by bringing together a best-in-class open source last-mile logistic system and a best-in-class full featured and comprehensive logistic network provider, Vitalliance will be well positioned to help bring a holistic solution to healthcare logistics support.

“I am looking forward to learning from the team at Vitalliance and their expertise in the commercial logistics space while also sharing the collaborative and open culture from the OpenLMIS project.”