INTERVIEW
TEST’ING THE METTLE “We created a team of people that understood the journey and the vision of the leader and was prepared for the dynamic environment and repeated change. We created a war room for managing our supply chain challenges. We also aligned our business partners at all the locations in case they were not able to make the supplies, then we transported the material with the help of our logistics team. With the support of our vendors, we could quickly ramp up our capacities and create new facilities for Covid testing with the increased capacity of handling huge surge of samples load,” shares Jaipal Singh, DGM – Commercial, Dr. Lal PathLabs Ltd., during an interview…
How was the year 2020 for you in managing supply chain? It was an extremely critical period. Lot of learnings and opportunities were a part of the tumultuous ride. We took efforts to understand the vendors’ capabilities because the challenges which were thrown upon us was completely unknown as till February 2020, no one in India was able to comprehend what was going to hit us in the times to come. From February 2020, we started realizing that our imports would get strained going forward. So, we immediately placed advanced orders and procured three months inventory. We also found several new players in the market to reduce our dependency on imports. As this was an unprecedented challenge, if we could not innovate in the shortest possible time along with our vendor base, we would
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have to lose our business. We realized that our risk mitigation strategy was not up to the mark to tide over the pandemic shockwaves. In short, what worked well for us was collaborating with new partners, enhancing vendor capabilities, and importing materials well ahead of time to withstand losses. We need to be future ready for any such circumstances and today we can say with confidence that with our abled team, we are fully prepared to turn such adversities into opportunities. To sum it up, it was a very challenging environment for the entire industry especially for healthcare. There was big bottleneck for the Covid Testing material and Personal Protection Equipment. It was a year of overpromise and underdelivery while demand supply elasticity was exceedingly high.
With over 22 years of experience, Jaipal Singh has expertise in procurement, material management and inventory management. Currently he is heading direct & indirect sourcing at Dr. Lal PathLabs. He is an MBA in Materials Management from Indian Institute of Materials Management and has also done Graduate Diploma in Materials Management.
Being in the frontline of this pandemic, what were the challenges faced by private players as there were lot many directives that were being altered one after another? Firstly, non-availability of goods with authorized dealer/distributor was very high. Many new opportunist vendors had emerged in this period to tap the opportunity. To iterate you with an example, our newly launched kits for Covid testing got approvals only in the month of April 2020 when the government allowed private players for mass testing. We started our journey of developing Covid kits and converted our three existing facilities in Delhi and Kolkata into full-fledged covid testing labs to start with. Our normal business operations had hit badly with the volumes plunging from 90% to 20%.
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