As the threat level facing Africa’s wildlife — particularly elephants and rhinos — continues to grow, traditional methods of supporting conservation efforts are no longer enough. This growing threat, along with the lack of funding and manpower, has driven the need for a creative solution. EPI-USE, G3G’s holding company, has developed a game-changing solution, ERP Airforce, which has become a critical component to wildlife protection efforts.
EPI-USE and its groupelephant.com community involvement program strongly believe that the use of technology is essential to improving conservation success. Key to this are unmanned aviation vehicles (UAVs), which monitor and track elephants within the reserves when it is not possible to monitor in person. The use of UAVs ultimately serves as a proactive deterrent to wildlife poaching related incidents.
How the Technology Works
Technological innovations from SAP in the mobile, cloud, integration, and Big Data spaces utilising SAP HANA technology, coupled with UAVs and experienced SAP developers at EPI-USE Africa, have resulted in the solution.
“With SAP Cloud Platform and the SAP Fiori mobile libraries, we can build a revolutionary solution in a non-traditional SAP market segment, changing the way conservationists monitor endangered wildlife,” says David Allen, associate manager of ERP Technical Services for EPI-USE.
ERP’s solution addresses the threat to elephants and minimises the human/elephant conflict by fitting the elephants with GPS collars for monitoring purposes. The monitors alert reserve management when elephants are approaching the reserve boundaries. This enables the reserve to respond proactively and limit the number of breaches. UAVs are used to monitor the elephant once the reserve management is alerted that they are approaching the reserve boundary.
Ensuring the elephants stay inside reserve boundaries reduces the poachers’ access to the animals; outside of reserve boundaries, the elephants are no longer protected. This same ERP Airforce will also be used to monitor poaching activities within the reserves and in the very near future, will be used for other wildlife protection efforts.
This solution is saving the lives of elephants. Now that’s a purpose worth undertaking.
The ERP Airforce solution is set to digitally transform not only EPI-USE’s ERP conservation efforts, but also those of traditional conservation bodies all over the world.
