Case Study
Medi-S received an urgent request for polypropylene medical gowns from a major medical supplies partner of the French government.
Date of request: 29 July 2020
Order quantity: 40 million units
Delivery deadline: End of September 2020
Mode of delivery: 1 fully-filled cargo plane departing every 1 to 2 days from 25 August 2020 onwards
The timeline was immensely tight, given that we only had 2 months to fulfil this new order in an extremely volatile market for medical supplies that was already facing a raw material crunch.
A Dynamic and Reactive Team
20 different partner factories were immediately contacted on 29 July, out of which 15 were visited for quality checks the very next day.
On 30 July, 6 different factories were selected as a combined effort to meet the client’s delivery schedule for this order. The final offer was made to the client on 31 July, and the order was confirmed on 3 August.
Within the next week, 3000 additional staff were mobilized on the production line to work on this order. Medi-S QC teams were sent on site to oversee the process at every factory, ensuring that strict quality standards were upheld during mass production.
Problem Solving & Foresight
On 14 August, our QC team noted that some factories were not able to keep up with the production schedules due to shortages in raw material supplies as well as a labor crunch.
The Medi-S procurement team had already foreseen that such issues could arise, and had been constantly searching for other back-up solutions in the event of such a delay.
As such, we were able to consolidate enough ready-made reserve stock within 2 days from other partnering factories to fill 2 entire planes, to be in time for the first cargo flights departing 25 August.
Optimizing Costs
With a total export volume of over 12,500 CBM for this order, or the equivalent of 380 freight containers, there was tremendous pressure for every cargo plane to be fully loaded with stock in order to keep the cost of logistics under control. The various Medi-S teams managed to find a perfect balance between the carton sizing and packing methods in order to optimize fulfillment costs for the client as much as possible.