The world is battling an outbreak of a pandemic (coronavirus) called COVID-19, which has claimed more than 1,00,000 lives and infected more than 18,00,000 lives around the world spreading insanely. Meanwhile, cases in other countries are going up, with millions of people confined to their homes.

What’s happening to the business world when Fighting with the Corona Virus at Home:

• COVID-19 presents significant challenges to people and organizations around the globe and the disruption continues to evolve.

•  Potential global recession

•  Financial impact, including effects on results of operations, future periods, and liquidity and capital resources.

•  Decrease in consumer confidence, reducing consumption.

•  Supply chain issues.

•  the effects on our workforce/ reduction in productivity.

•  Impacts on tax, trade or immigration.

Relationships with suppliers and scenario planning capabilities have been put to the test during the crisis. Companies should now be planning for recovery, while also taking time to remodel their supply chains in light of new risk and competitive performance dimensions.

Here are a few points at the supply standpoint of Medical Industry:

• Major Medical Product issues: Medical industry is facing critical shortage of medical products and equipment worldwide. i.e. Lack of face masks, sanitizers, protective suits, medicine and medical equipment.

•  Quality Issues: Some of the suppliers are with inferior quality, yes, especially many new set-ups after the outbreak of the virus in China.

• Certification issues: There are only 10+ real CE/FDA certified mask manufacturers in China and their production has been scheduled up to Aug or Sep. As, the normal CE/FDA certification process takes weeks and months, it doesn’t happen overnight.

• Government requests:

– All the governments in the world are requesting N95, FFP2, FFP3 masks which are not available from the market at all!

– Facing issues in Medical equipment’s- I.e. Ventilators, Thermometers, patient monitors, hospital beds etc.

• Cultural differences: Huge cultural difference of wearing masks- 80% of the masks are for civilians in China, but 80% of the masks go to the health organizations in the western world.

•  Buyers Beware, Seller Beware: 80% of the sellers and buyers are just “new comers” or even speculators with little or no knowledge about the product, supply chain, market, and they don’t know differences of regulations of different countries at all. Many civilian masks are sold as medical masks.

• No supply chain process control before buying any medical products or equipment’s —document reviewing, factory audit, background investigation, quality inspection, etc.

It’s so stupid to keep the important issues go in vain while hundreds and thousands of people are dying day by day!

Please comment and share to spread the voice on this common issue of our global family.