For NetSuite developers and system architects, few events are as eagerly anticipated as the annual SuiteWorld Hackathon 4Good. This competition draws together some of the brightest minds in the NetSuite universe to develop new and innovative solutions for not for profit organisations.
This year, Annexa took part for the first time and stood out by clinching the top prize with a solution that promises to drive greater impact in bird conservation efforts.
Below, we provide a detailed technical rundown of the winning solution and how it is designed to revolutionise conservation work for the American Bird Conservancy.
Annexa's Director, Jarred Spriggs, and Bart Wadley, Annexa Solution Architect, joined forces with two fellow Aussie NetSuite professionals - Tim Pilgrim at SuiteFunction and Shannon Barratt, Head of ICT at Abco Products - to take on this challenge.
American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is dedicated to conserving wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. With an emphasis on achieving results and working in partnership, ABC takes on the greatest problems facing birds today, innovating and building on rapid advancements in science to prevent bird extinctions, reverse bird population declines, reduce threats to all birds, and build the bird conservation movement.
They are currently implementing a large-scale vision to conserve the next 10 million acres of bird habitat, which they're calling the 10 million Acre Challenge
Create a project priority list for American Bird Conservancy to optimize impact based on bird risk levels, bird population density, and associated conservation costs. Each team must produce:
The competition began on August 19 2024, giving teams a few weeks to prepare and build a strong foundation prior to SuiteWorld in Las Vegas.
From the outset, the Annexa team understood the importance of integrating technical excellence with customer-centric design. The solution had to do more than just make sense of data - it needed to provide actionable, accessible insights that could guide ABC's conservation efforts.
On August 26, each team was given the full dataset, which included:
This allowed the team to get to work and be ready at SuiteWorld with:
On the first day of SuiteWorld, each Hackathon team had the opportunity to engage with the customer and machine learning experts to refine their solutions. These feedback sessions gave further access to insights that could help enhance the model's accuracy and user interface. During this time, Annexa worked directly with the customer to validate their findings and ensure their solution addressed the prototypes key objectives - scalability, accuracy, ease of use, and the elimination of bottlenecks.
From there, Jarred Spriggs continued to lead the technical development. This involved carefully considering how data processed within OCI would interact with NetSuite to create seamless interactions between these technical elements and the customer-facing components within NetSuite.
Meanwhile, Bart Wadley concentrated on the NetSuite interface, ensuring it was user-friendly and aligned with the customer's needs. The team's rapid iteration process allowed them to refine their predictive models and user interactions, creating a seamless solution that met the customer’s requirements.
Annexa then refined their relational data model to connect various data points, including grants, sub-awards, projects, activities, and species impact. This created a comprehensive scoring system by linking data elements like species impact, habitat conditions, and financial metrics.
Specifically, the model assessed projects and activities on multiple risk metrics, including:
This detailed, reporting solution aimed to provide the American Bird Conservancy with actionable insights, helping them prioritise projects in a more strategic and impactful way.
By evaluating factors such as bird population data, habitat conditions, and financial metrics, the prototype was designed to effectively rank and prioritise conservation projects. Importantly, this approach would enable the tracking of birds and habitats, but also link these elements to conservation activities and available grants.
On day two of SuiteWorld, each team presented their solutions to a panel of judges, which included experts from Oracle NetSuite and representatives from the American Bird Conservancy.
The team's presentation demonstrated how their AI/ML-powered solution delivered accurate forecasts while enhancing the user experience within NetSuite. They emphasised the solution’s user-friendly design, its precision in predicting project impact, and its scalability to support future growth.
Specifically, the team demonstrated the accuracy of their scoring model from OCI, showing how standard records within NetSuite could be linked to various data sources. They also provided insights into NetSuite searches and analytics, illustrating how the solution delivered a seamless user experience. Emphasising ease of adoption, they offered personalised documentation tailored to the end user. In the end, Annexa delivered exactly what the customer was looking for, securing the hard working team the win.
Jarred Spriggs, a key participant in the Annexa team, shared his perspective on the experience:
“This being my fifth NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference, I’ve always wanted to give back and contribute to not for profits using my technical skills and knowledge. I saw this as a great opportunity to help and make a meaningful contribution through the Hackathon 4Good. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how detailed the challenge would be, especially as it pushed us beyond our core skill set - building mathematical models outside of NetSuite in OCI. It was a real challenge, but it was also great to get the mind working on something so complex.”
Reflecting on the team's success in winning the Hackathon 4Good, Jarred added:
“We really listened to the customer on the day, and we asked the right questions - What's important to you? How do you rank your projects? How do you allocate funds? How do you know if the species is important to protect or not? So, we really drilled down into how they do their job day-to-day to then make the model and the application do that for them.
Then we took our entry in a direction that really prioritised usability for the customer. It wasn’t just about creating a mathematical model for ranking, it was about providing real insights through their NetSuite dashboard. This has helped them to rank projects, drill down into specific details, and sort and segment the information to support their financial and operational decisions.
By building a relational data model, the customer can view projects from multiple perspectives. They can focus on projects within a specific habitat and rank them accordingly, rather than just relying on a total project score. This flexibility is what made the solution so powerful.”
The Hackathon 4Good highlighted how not-for-profits can harness their data within the NetSuite ecosystem to drive meaningful change. For ABC, they are already set on engaging the team to deploy their winning solution. But it also serves as a compelling example of how NetSuite’s extensible cloud ERP platform, with embedded AI and ML, can be a powerful force for good. As Jarred Spriggs said:
"Lots of our customers have their own unique IP and processes, and they need to pull together various data to keep their business running. This project was really about our ability to solve that problem for this customer and make their lives easier. By bringing all that data into a unified system, we can provide core insights and automation, leveraging the system to do the work instead of having their IP sit offline."
If you're a not-for-profit considering NetSuite, Annexa can help amplify your impact. We design and develop powerful NetSuite solutions that enable you to respond swiftly to changing financial conditions, measure program impact, and adjust strategies to maximise effectiveness.