Effectively managing Lunar New Year supply challenges

Since being established in 2022, HSV’s Supply Chain Surety team has been focused on establishing a proactive surety process to complement its reactive work to manage and mitigate supply chain risk for Victoria’s public health system.

Optimising their processes means applying strong supply management principles to anticipate supply challenges and disruptions and working to improve demand signals to our suppliers ahead of potential challenges.

“Health sector supply chains continue to face challenges from COVID-19, geopolitical tensions, natural disasters and rapidly changing global markets,” says HSV Director Supply Chain Surety Kate Warren.

“These supply chain shocks not only affect the availability of raw materials and essential medical products, they can also lead to an increase in demand.”

Recently, the team used supplier data, global intelligence and strong local and international working relationships to foresee and navigate an unprecedented potential supply issue in China due to the five-day public holiday. This year’s holiday also coincided with China’s easing of its local COVID-19 restrictions for the first time.

Typically, Lunar New Year holidays mean many manufacturing, logistics and export operations within China – from where we source significant volumes of essential medical supplies – temporarily shut down. Combined this year with the anticipated surge in COVID-19 cases due to mass population movement, this posed the potential for supply chain disruptions.

“To manage this risk, the Surety team gathered supplier data and employed risk management tactics – we contacted our top 30 suppliers in China to ensure ongoing, sufficient supply flow,” says Kate.

This proactive approach ensures HSV continues to have visibility of potential disruptions and of stock on hand at health services, as well as robust incident management systems for medical supply assurance. This includes the Critical Supplies Register currently in development.

From this recent experience, the Surety team continues to improve its global intelligence and research capacity using the latest risk methodologies and technologies. The introduction of AI and machine learning is helping identify global insights from major news and health publications.

“While supplier data continues to be of primary importance, the use of digital technology will be essential to enable us to stay on top of developing trends of concern, ensuring our continued focus on our core HSV values,” says Kate.