The second 4 day week passed without disaster but some annoying lessons must be learned as a balance to the achievements. My concerns of April 5 about PPE are now more acute.

So what were the achievements? First we finished the repacking into re-pulpable bags. We now have a brand-new hot melt gun and we have shown that we operate with 61% of the amount of glue that we had originally costed for. It has brought the cost of glue below the cost of bags! We also finished the second of the parallel trade jobs but I haven’t seen the profitability report yet. Third we completed the premix blend for a new pesticide powder job that has come from an old customer that hasn’t worked with us for a while and that promises to be a significant annual tonnage. Finally we made two IBCs of bulk hand sanitizer for a major client who had been trying to get us to do so for some time. Getting the right formulation to produce a clear product of the right pH and viscosity had cost some time after we eventually had secured enough of the propyl alcohol. The mixing process proved to be time-consuming and the two batches took about 12 hours in all. A classic example of a learning curve whereby the first took 8 hours and the second 4. With preparation and an order for 5-10 IBCs we could probably get the cycle time down to 2 hours.

And the annoying lessons? Well the re-pulpable bag filling job was concluded with a 2% loss of yield. This is a significant mass in a 20 tonne order and is believed to have come from a failure to count the bags accurately into the shipping boxes. Instructions to use a “tally” system to log the count and the failure to implement an interim reconciliation system by the team or supervision are obvious lessons that we seem to be doomed to learn the hard way. The other lessons concern the time it takes to move from the production of the paperwork to the completion of the production preparations to the completion of the first batch. The risk assessment,  communication, equipment assembly, cleaning, weighing, charging, blending, discharging all seem to take an age. The lesson is perhaps to measure these steps, standardise them and rigorously build them into future production plans! In the case of the hand sanitizing gel our customer told us that his customer had cancelled the order just as we were completing the first batch. Now he wants us to pack it off into 25litre bottles so I suppose we got some extra work even if it leaves us with two unhappy customers.

The subject of PPE is another story. The world and his wife now know that PPE is important and that it involves masks and gowns used by the angels of the NHS and care services. We use PPE too and we use the same sort of FFP2 and FFP3 masks and some of the same gloves as the front-line NHS people and we use it to protect our people from fine powder particles entering their lungs. We have not been able to purchase masks through our usual channels or by any internet sources for over three weeks. In view of the difficulties being experienced by the Health Secretary this is not surprising. We don’t stand a chance of receiving anything until the NHS gets what it needs.

So as I sit and watch the Ministers squirming under the incessant attack over the lack of one sort of PPE or another I actually have huge sympathy for them. Why? Because the moaners are all angry and afraid and because they seem to have no perception of the both the complexity and sheer scale of the numbers involved. All they know is that the cupboard is bare, and like my people, they expect the cupboard to be refilled immediately. It is their job to consume and be safe and it is my job to provide. After all I should have known well in advance how many of each item would be required and where to obtain them and how to get them delivered to the right place irrespective of the absence of any realistic forecast of the number and timing of the requirement. I should have known that the ultimate source of many of the key components for these apparently simple but actually quite sophisticated items, all made and tested to a rigorous and seemingly immutable standard, is in China, which has only recently recovered and the USA which has closed its gates.

If there are 1.5 million employees in the NHS and 1.6 million care staff and every one of them needs a new mask every day then the Government needs to receive and distribute 3.1 million masks every day or 21.7 million masks every week. This is a big number. We don’t have a manufacturing base in this country for that sort of quantity of that sort of item at that rate of output. We might be able to create one, but not overnight or in a few days, and that assumes that we would have access to the materials and be able to approve the product to the immutable standards required in the same time. Why? Because in the complex world of manufacturing today we are not an island! We source our materials from anywhere in the world that can provide us with the best price and performance outcome. We are often sole sourced for these things for reasons of economy of scale. We operate just in time systems based on reliable forecasts of requirements so that we don’t need to hold large expensive and deteriorating stocks of things.

I expect that the global experience of the pandemic will result in changes in the sourcing strategies of many industries that have suffered from supply interruptions. The government may choose to do something itself for those items which have now gained such strategic significance. It will be interesting to see how that can be done in a capitalist economy without an enormous amount of waste.