Corona and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

We all remember the Aesop's fable of a shepherd boy who tended a flock of sheep near a village and devised a plan to provide some amusement to his stultifying boredom. Several times he brought out the villagers by crying "Wolf! Wolf! and when the town's people came to help him, he laughed at them because they had fallen for his ruse.

The Wolf however did come at last. The shepherd boy ran again to the village, but when he cried "Wolf!" this time, his neighbors did not heed his cries or offer any assistance as they believed that the boy was, again, just "having them on". The Wolf obliterated the flock at his leisure.

The moral of this story is that no one believes a liar, even when telling the truth. Yet I believe when considering disaster planning for the supply chain, this story has a different moral -- When constantly barraged with news coverage of a real or threatened catastrophe, we have become desensitized and an immunity develops that creates its own threat -- that of indifference and that could prove disastrous for business operations and the Supply Chain.

And now the Wolf Corona pandemic is here, and it has seemingly caught global supply chains off-guard.

It shouldn't have. At least not to the extent it has.

We had warnings, about the potential for dire disasters and their massive impacts on society and the supply chain. There have been tsunamis, earthquakes, mass flooding, ice storms and blackouts. There was Hurricane Katrina. There was 9/11. And there have been numerous health emergencies and/or pandemics like SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, HIV/AIDS.

But the way the world is reacting now with Covid-19 is somewhat like the townspeople in the fable did. We are surprised that there actually is a Wolf, although we have seen it lurking for many years!

Covid-19 is unprecedented and I am not saying that we could have been totally prepared for this by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps, at least from a public policy and supply chain perspective, we could have been significantly more prepared. Significantly!

No one notices the supply chain when everything is working well. It is an area that is taken for granted, and some may think it is easy because in most cases things arrive and to the casual observer, whether a corporation or an individual, who receives their goods on time, at a good price, with acceptable quality, not much time is wasted thinking about it.

However now, everyone from the political leaders on down are talking about supply chain, as if the issues of non supply could not have been mitigated in some way. But some mitigation could have occurred with a "break in case of emergency" program which should have been undoubtedly more robust than most business continuity/disaster plans.

How important it is to have resilient supply chains?

I guess in today's world you have the answer. In preparing for the pandemic or for any other disaster has your organization taken the time to not just understand tier 1, but the tier 2, 3 etc. of your suppliers. In the event of a disaster how can they supply you? How can you ensure that with the panic reactions to getting supply, that you don't allow for corruption, human rights abuses and everything you have worked hard from ridding your supply chain of hasn't creeped back in? Where is the weakest link in your suppliers' supply chain and in the case of the unpredictable what is their plan? How can you be part of their efforts in an emergency situation? Do you have the phone numbers/email contact of every senior person at a supplier, if they are core to your business/project delivery? And if they are not core, do you still have all the contact information of other suppliers and their key contact names? Where do you have all this information? Is it just online accessible by one or a few or do you actually have it in hard copy just in case? And even if you have all of these things (which I very much doubt) do you have an annual mark in your calendar to update all that information?

Are you sole sourcing and thus have little option with a supplier if they are impacted by a disaster and are unable to supply? Particularly in public procurement we too often rush to sole source because we think it is easier and give us a better deal. I personally have been against sole sourcing since time immemorial on critical items because I have personally seen too often the impact of "Humpty Dumpty" falling off that wall, and then the scramble, often to the detriment of quality and price, to get an alternative supplier with whom you haven't nurtured a relationship.

I am worried that once Covid-19 is under control and some of the navel gazing over a couple of years becomes a memory, we will forget the importance of what we have learned and could apply. Similar to what happened in some jurisdictions with SARS, where they planned for the next pandemic, by stocking up a warehouse with lots of supplies for the future, only to let it languish and by the time we got to this pandemic, everything had expired, because nobody was tasked to maintain it.

We can't let this happen again. Right now we are the townspeople who are surprised there is a Wolf, although we have seen it lurking around on the periphery and making random raids into our proverbial "town."

Get all the "townspeople" to develop a resilient supply chain plan and maintain it. Take supply chain to the boardroom table and keep this discipline there so that ongoing discussions over time will always include it.

We need to continuously plan for the next Wolf, because we can be assured there will be one.

It's just a matter of time