From Concept to Impact: A Recap of Paperless Parts’ Fall 2023 Hackathon

Last week at the Paperless Parts Boston HQ, we held our Fall Hackathon. Our bi-annual Hackathon allows our organization’s talented engineers and product experts to show off their skills and work together to expand those skills and ultimately improve our product and make our customers’ lives easier. Participants, audience members, and judges alike are able to learn and experiment with new technologies, create proof of concept for new features, or level up a process or pain point felt by the team internally. With little direction yet lots of collaboration, there’s endless room for creativity.

How it Works

Over a period of two days, our engineers and product experts group into teams and identify a pain point of our users or braoder area for improvement in the Paperless Parts platform. They then rapidly develop prototypes and proof of concepts to demonstrate a proposed solution. At the end of day two, each team presents their ideas to the entire organization, including a panel of judges.

The judges award a Grand Prize winner, which is followed by a vote put to the entire company for a People’s Choice award.

Prototyped ideas range anywhere from brand new features to the platform to revamped environments. Here were the teams whose ideas won over the hearts of both the judges and spectators:

Grand Prize Winners

Kelli Therrien, MacKenzie Kerwin, Lindsay Richter, Monika Wilson, and Sarah Seatter

People’s Choice Award Winners

Thomas Czartoryski, Pranav Phadke, and Ben Horgan

Making an Impact

The Paperless Parts Hackathon is a great opportunity for people to see what anyone can accomplish if they run directly at a problem with their own unique skill set. Presenters ideate, build the business case, design the solution, write the code, then give the demo and sales pitch. This type of approach drives a stronger understanding of what it takes to bring a product to market.

Each of the Hackathon teams approached different problems from a variety of different angles, which led to projects being incredibly customer-centric and high-impact. Solutions and improvements were focused on a variety of areas, such as CMMC, assemblies, data visibility, part file analysis, order facilitation, and so much more. While we don’t want to spoil anything, we’ll let the photo below speak to the excitement around the new features—many of which were feasible and ready enough to be shipped next-day. Stay tuned for some exciting new features headed your way soon.