S.B.C. Panamá

About the Project

When I visited my birth father's embroidery and silk screening business in David, Panama in 2007, I found controlled chaos. Orders were getting mixed up, inventory was scattered across the shop floor in unmarked boxes, and the staff constantly interrupted my brother to ask where things were or how to set up machines. The business was growing, but without any formal systems in place, that growth was creating more problems than profit. Over the next five years, I helped transform S.B.C. Panamá using donated computers, open-source software, and custom Ruby on Rails applications built on a shoestring budget. The result: the company tripled its revenue, saved over 1,000 hours of labor annually, and my brother finally stopped fielding dozens of questions every day.

The Challenge

I knew from my work with The Village Bank that database-driven applications could radically improve how a business operates. But S.B.C. wasn't a bank. It had no IT budget, no computers beyond a single shared desktop, and certainly no money for commercial software licenses. If I was going to help, I'd need to get creative. The bigger challenge wasn't technical, though. It was figuring out which problems to solve first in a business where everything felt urgent and nothing was documented.

My Approach

Building the Foundation

I started by scrounging together an IT infrastructure from spare parts. I found an organization willing to donate old laptops, brought those computers to Panama, and installed Ubuntu on them, a free, open-source operating system. I also procured a basic server. None of this was fancy, but it gave me a platform to build on for under $5,000.

Tackling Inventory First

The inventory room was my first target because it was choking the entire operation. Over 5,000 t-shirts were crammed into cardboard boxes with no organization system, stacked haphazardly around the room. When someone needed a specific size and color, they'd spend 15 minutes digging through boxes, often coming up empty even when the shirt was actually in stock.

I spent several months working with the staff to physically sort and organize every single shirt. But organization alone wasn't enough—we needed a system that could handle the reality of a busy production floor where things don't stay perfectly arranged. So I built a Ruby on Rails-based inventory application with a flexible storage system. Instead of requiring shirts to be in specific locations, the app let workers store them almost anywhere and quickly look up their location through a simple web interface. Order fulfillment time dropped from 15 minutes to under 5.

Solving the Setup Bottleneck

With inventory under control, I turned to another major pain point: setting up embroidery machines. Before production could start, workers needed to track down the right design file and print configuration instructions—a process that often took 20 minutes and required interrupting my brother to ask where things were. He was spending hours each day answering these questions instead of doing his actual job.

I built a second design-focused web application that consolidated all the design files, configuration details, and setup instructions into one searchable interface. What had taken 20 minutes now took less than one. More importantly, workers could find everything themselves. My brother could finally focus on running the business instead of being a human filing cabinet.

The Results

These changes cost S.B.C. less than $5,000 in hardware and transformed how the company operated. Revenue tripled over three years, and the staff gained both confidence and autonomy. They knew what to do and where to find what they needed without constant supervision.

For me, this project reinforced something I'd learned at the bank: the best technology solutions aren't always the most sophisticated ones. Sometimes the biggest impact comes from taking the time to understand what's actually slowing people down, then building the simplest thing that solves that specific problem. Whether that means upgrading donated laptops or spending months organizing t-shirts, you don't need a big budget to make a real difference, you just need to be resourceful and willing to get your hands dirty.