SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE AND STORE FULFILLMENT / BOPIS

Is retail store fulfillment / #BOPIS a Supply Chain anti resilience approach with its dependence on people as compared to technology in warehouses? Just asking.

COVID-19 VACCINE—A SUPPLY CHAIN OPERATIONS PLAN

 

A vaccine for CoViD is getting much attention.  There are several firms in different countries working on it.  Now there are articles on a macro view of the number of planes needed to transport and the required temperatures for a vaccine. These and other articles are interesting with their high-level view. 

But they are not actionable.  What is needed is an end-to-end (E2E) global supply chain operation plan to distribute the vaccine across the world.  This is complex in what must be done, the geographic scope, product requirements, and the time pressure to do it.

With a world population of 7.8 billion and possibly 2 doses per person, this is a huge undertaking to move it around the globe.  Upfront, the availability of potential transportation and storage resources seems insufficient.  That adds to the challenge and need for a plan—to be ahead of the game and to minimize as many problems—and there will be problems.

Presented here is a plan, rough perhaps, with many unknowns at this time.  It is a working document that can be updated as more details/information arises as to product requirements, production location or locations; country demand; transportation, storage, and logistics resources; and other specifics evolve. Please note, the names of any transportation, warehouse, or logistics firms will not be mentioned. This is about the plan. Names will arise with the design and implementation.

A very important point.  This project defines VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The standard approaches will not work.  Change will be a dynamic constant to the point it could be considered organized chaos.

Again, 7.8 billion people in 100+ countries, possibly 2 doses each, a potential vaccine that requires temperature protection at below freezing temperatures or face vaccine degradation. Protecting the vaccine from manufacturing through to injection is the underlying concern with the project and will require more than transportation and storage.  VUCA. A project that defines challenge.

·       Prepare a list of contacts at receiving countries who will coordinate, both medical and supply chain. Collaboration is important for such an end-to-end undertaking.

·       Err on the side of caution with developing and implementing the plan.

·       Start with vaccine raw materials/ingredients (active and inactive)—where sourced, production rates and quantities, how to ship, what is required for handling & storage, including space.  Do not forget vials and/or ampules, caps, labels, and packaging.

·       Understand production batch/lot sizes and production rate, including any as to language for labels.

·       Establish a plan that covers the entire timeline--from launch period through to expected production to satisfy worldwide needs. 

·       Know the product distribution plan—ship how many to where and the sequencing/prioritization.  That is a starting point.  With this is recognizing how to pack the shipment to maintain temperature.

·       Measure time from door-to-door for each origin-destination.  This is critical for product temperature protection.

·       Understand that transportation space and availability and cold chain storage space will influence shipment sizes.

·       Track vaccine drawdowns. This is important for shipment scheduling and to not have more product at a destination than there is temperature protection space.

·       Recognize destination and origin-destination differences. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It must understand and adapt to the product and operating realities.  This is important.

·       Assign countries to ship to if there are multiple production sites.

·       Collaborate and coordinate with destination supply chain people on transport and warehouse issues, space, local nuances, providers, and other issues.  This should be ongoing.

·       Determine special needs as to cold chain and/or cool chain temperature for storage, transport, sanitary, chain of custody. Do this for each tier of transport and storage for vials unopened and opened.  Chain of custody is important to manage the product requirements, operational events, and to prevent criminals from theft, and to restrict counterfeits.

·       Analyze space and service needs for air cargo and cold/cool chain storage.

·       Calculate for each destination as to shipments sizes, ready release dates, and the number of shipments.

·       Calculate storage needs at the origin, including production rate and build inventory timing and releases/drawdowns.

·       Calculate storage needs for each destination.

·       Focus on door-to-door speed.

·       Minimize the number of handlings, stops, and transfers of products to mitigate temperature and contamination problems.

·       Understand destinations—airports, adequacies for storage and moving vaccine safely.

·       Define what carriers, warehouses, and transport/logistics providers can do as to product requirements, shipment/storage over the total timeframe, and sanitary conditions. Do it for origin, destinations, and intermediate locations.

·       Secure contractual firm space and service commitments by origin-destination (not by an aggregate or macro basis) to meet what is required for product requirements and time to perform, including variation, for transport and warehousing.  Lock it up.

·       Conclude transport and storage capabilities with production and distribution plans.

·       Set the technology to follow the movement of the vaccine—bar code, RFID, or other.

·       Maintain temperature integrity. Track end-to-end temperature.

·       Monitor chain of custody.

·       Achieve maximum E2E visibility, technologies, and technology integration.

·       Understand Customs requirements at destination airports to speed movement and quick handling from planes landing and shipping to end destinations.

·       Quantify that hospitals, doctors, and other medical/pharmaceutical places that will dispense vaccine can handle for safe handling and storage.

·       Ensure needed supplies of syringes, swabs, bandaids, gloves, and other needed PPE at each dispensing destination location.

The above would present the ideal, Plan A model.  But the best-laid plans, including expected shortages of air cargo and cold chain storage infrastructure and capabilities and stability, a Plan B, a C, and even D or more to have the needed scope and viability, are useful to be ready for the just-in-case and to cover all the needs, especially temperature related. 

Here the purpose is to identify, assess, and mitigate risks/problems. This would include:

ü      Identify areas/points where there are inadequacies, including destination alternatives in  the event of transport and/or storage shortcomings.

Analyze potential performance problem areas.

ü Review ways to improve performance door-to-door and mitigate delays. Big ways to lesser ways. For example, for customs clearance and freight payment.

ü Assess gaps between needs and space availabilities.

ü Evaluate technology gaps, such as for visibility.

ü Create alternative lanes for transportation routes and storage for coverage.

ü Develop cooling alternatives and how and where best to use them.

The plan that is developed for the vaccine also has to be prepared for other events that can affect the operations.  For example, what if there was a global demand surge for CoViD monoclonal antibody therapies that would compete for many of the same supply chain resources as the vaccine?

There is much work to be done.  Much is at stake here.  And much to do it--the required process, technology, organization, and logistics infrastructure.  A supply chain team in place early to design a program—then to manage it.  The size and complexity of the project demand it. 

TWO BIGGEST CHALLENGES IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AND LOGISTICS / TRANSPORTATION

There are two ongoing, large critical challenges for supply chain management, procurement, logistics, maritime, air cargo, trucking, transportation, intermodal, rail, warehousing:

1. Pandemic
2. Climate change

You must deal with them.  There is no other viable option.

CHINA BELT AND ROAD

China. Belt And Road. Good article. Step back. BRI as a trade & logistics effort? Grow & dominate in these areas? The size now of COSCO. Asia-Europe rail. Drive China's role globally. This view of logistics & trade impact can be significant. Watch it.

The Imperial Overreach of China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Xi Jinping’s signature foreign project is poorly defined, badly mismanaged and visibly failing

By Jonathan E. Hillman

Oct. 1, 2020 9:27 am ET

The Wall Street Journal

Pundits often describe today’s China as uber-strategic, seeing its every move as carefully coordinated, guided by history and focused on the long run. But Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature foreign-policy vision, the Belt and Road Initiative, is actually poorly defined and horribly mismanaged. As China pushes ahead with this colossal infrastructure-building spree, it is following in the footsteps of past empires and seriously overreaching.

The Belt and Road “is neither a Marshall Plan nor a geostrategic concept,” China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, said in 2018. In fact, it is even more ambitious. The Marshall Plan harnessed the equivalent of $130 billion to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Since the Belt and Road’s announcement in 2013, China has signed $460 billion in construction contracts across more than 140 countries, according to the American Enterprise Institute. The initiative now reaches into Africa, Latin America, cyberspace and even outer space. And as China is learning in place after place, it is much harder to develop economies than to rebuild them.

In the first place, Chinese officials will likely come to regret making Pakistan, in their words, the “flagship” of the Belt and Road Initiative, with some 40 projects, valued at an estimated $25 billion, under way there. Beijing believes that it can succeed in transforming the country after Washington has struggled for decades there. But it shouldn’t count on it.

In the 1950s, Western economists arrived in Pakistan and tried to help the newly independent country fashion a long-term development plan. But as poorly coordinated aid poured in, Pakistani officials resisted setting priorities and making difficult reforms. “When I went to Pakistan, I had the $60 million to spend and no plan, no program, nothing,” recalled John Bell, who oversaw U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan in the mid-1950s. Asked for a list of priorities, the head of Pakistan’s Economic Planning Ministry replied, “No, we need everything, we need everything.”

Intended to last 18 months, the foreign advisory mission launched more than a half-century ago essentially never ended. Eventually, the World Bank stepped in as well, and over the years, the U.S. has provided Pakistan with more than $80 billion in aid. Last year, the International Monetary Fund bailed out Pakistan for the 22nd time. If neighboring Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, Pakistan is the black hole of foreign assistance.

Hubris partly explains why Chinese officials have bet big on Pakistan and other risky markets. China’s own rise, after all, has been fueled by dramatic infrastructure spending. Its top leaders have all ascended in a system that rewards GDP growth, which they have learned to boost through building infrastructure. After weathering the 2008 financial crisis, during which Western institutions struggled so visibly, Chinese leaders concluded that their playbook was superior and would work abroad.

In its zeal to build, China has backed projects that the U.S. wisely avoided long ago. In 1973, Pakistan asked the U.S. to build a port in Baluchistan, its largest and least-populated region, and offered to provide the U.S. Navy with access to it. “This would probably cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, and the political impact of the project will depend in part on its not being a white elephant,” Henry Kissinger cautioned in a memo that year to President Nixon.

Decades later, China granted Pakistan’s wish and built the port, but very little has arrived at its docks, which remain largely disconnected from urban areas inland. Meanwhile, China’s activities have angered India, which rejects the Belt and Road’s path through territory in the north that Pakistan and India both claim.

China faces even more checks on its power abroad than its imperial predecessors. In June, a Kenyan court ruled that China’s contract for a $3 billion railway between Nairobi and Mombasa was illegal because it violated public procurement practices. When Britain built the first railway between those cities more than a century ago, it didn’t have to contend with international standards, local courts, investigative reporters or cellphone cameras.

Belt and Road also suffers from a gross lack of transparency and accountability. China has no firm criteria for what qualifies as a project and keeps lending details secret. This allows Beijing to make friends in high places abroad, but it also raises the likelihood that commercially dubious projects will get the green light. And once Belt and Road projects are approved, China often struggles to monitor them.

On the ground, China’s massive state-owned enterprises, which include seven of the world’s 10 largest construction companies, run the show. These bloated giants often have more personnel, technical expertise and local relationships than the government officials charged with supervising them. Desperate to find new work, these firms want to build projects as soon as possible, regardless of their commercial viability or strategic value.

China’s loans extend its influence into foreign capitals, and critics warn that Beijing is using “debt trap” diplomacy, lending so that it can seize the recipient countries’ strategic assets. They point to a Sri Lankan port that China financed and built, for which it now has a 99-year lease—the same length that Britain once secured for its control of Hong Kong. No one needs to draw this connection for Sri Lankans, who won their independence from British colonial rule seven decades ago.

But the “debt trap” accusation is actually too generous to Chinese officials, casting Beijing’s embarrassing mismanagement as a strategic masterstroke. In Sri Lanka’s case, like other hot spots along the Belt and Road, Chinese officials lent recklessly to projects that other lenders avoided and are now scrambling to salvage what they can. When projects fail, Beijing suffers in both its finances and its reputation.

Indeed, China is walking into a trap of its own design. Globally, most large infrastructure projects cost more than expected, take longer than expected and deliver fewer benefits than expected, according to Oxford University researchers. To further raise the likelihood of failure, China has picked dangerous partners: Most countries participating in the Belt and Road have sovereign-debt ratings that are either junk or not rated.

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing the difficulties that Chinese officials face in changing course. In June, China estimated that 20% of Belt and Road projects were “seriously affected” by the pandemic, while another 30% to 40% were “somewhat affected.” Bangladesh, Egypt and Tanzania had recently canceled or indefinitely postponed big-ticket projects. But incredibly, the Chinese official making the announcement was careful to note that China wasn’t aware of any major projects being canceled.

As in so many earlier imperial adventures, China is struggling to cut its losses, even as fewer new projects are announced. A debt crisis in emerging markets is looming, and historically, most infrastructure booms go bust. But the Belt and Road is enshrined in the Chinese Communist Party constitution like a tattoo gotten during a drunken binge. It cannot be removed or even called ugly. It is Mr. Xi’s vision, and until he leaves power or says stop, Chinese officials will march forward with it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-imperial-overreach-of-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-11601558851?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1