Just had a presentation at work about PPE the non-confidential part of which I hope you'll find interesting... (thread) #Covid19 #PPE

I work for a very large global healthcare/pharma business which is developing a Covid19 vaccine it hopes to have tested, approved for use and a billion doses produced by the end of H1 2021. I'm a lawyer in the less exciting procurement department.

PPE was already important for the business not only in its large number of "clean" production facilities and labs, but also when deploying at hundreds of thousands of healthcare settings round the world.

In January, as Covid 19 hit China, there was a huge spike in demand for PPE in China in particular. This was difficult to cope with for a number of reasons.

First, the province in China which was heaviest hit also is the province where a big proportion of global PPE production is located.

This combined with 20 of the biggest Chinese PPE producers shutting down over Chinese New Year meant that China needed a lot of PPE to come from the rest of the world and fast.

It also meant that big users of PPE around the world needed to start looking for alternative sources other than China at a time when Chinese production was down and global production being heavily diverted to China.

In February, countries around the world started their response to these realities, bringing in export bans and capacity allocations for PPE to try to maintain their supplies.

Then, in March, there was a tidal wave of challenges building on this and demand rising several multiples as Covid19 spread to EMEA and North America. Organisationally this meant that there suddenly was a proliferation of demand points rather than just sending everything to Wuhan

On top of this, unsolicited approaches from suppliers of PPE became a big problem. Validating the suppliers and sifting out those which were fraudulent scammers or suppliers of counterfeits was a big job.

This rather explains why we're now seeing a load of people in the UK complaining that they'd got in touch with the NHS to offer PPE and heard nothing back! Such offers, even when in good faith caused a problem for buyers designed to source in bulk from a a few trusted suppliers

Rather than those who were set up to make lots of small orders from a proliferation of small suppliers they had no prior relationship with. This is not ineptitude or a malign indifference.

Going into April and beyond, the concerns are in logistics. International transport is becoming restricted so everyone is moving to local supply and local storage rather than national or regional. A mix of on and offshore is needed.

This was all possible to handle with a highly resourced procurement/logistics specialist organisation, set up over 5 years ago to be able to cope with global and regional crises to maintain business continuity.

Doing it from scratch in organisations which have different core priorities and competences is much more difficult. But ultimately you can't buy what doesn't exist, which someone else has already bought or which a state has sequestered.