The requirement:

The Australian Federal Government required large volumes of disposal medical masks to be procured and imported into Australia for immediate distribution.

These medical masks were to meet Australian Standards and TGA requirements and to be fit for purpose.

Immediate manufacture and air freight into Australia was required, along with delivery to the designated distribution centre.

The challenge:

At the time disposal medical masks were the most difficult product to source globally.

Therefore, it was critical to lock a manufacturer to produce to a guaranteed schedule, and ensuring the production met Australian and TGA standards including labelling and packaging.

Manufacture had to meet all export requirements for medical masks, including being listed on the Global Export Medical Whitelist. We were the only importer to arrange this and ensure that freight was not held up.

There were considerable air freight logistics challenges. 90% of flights into Australia were not operating, and available airfreight was closed out due to the pre booked back log of priority airfreight. Further to this, airlines around the world were grounding aircraft daily, putting even more pressure on airfreight.

Available aircraft with committed airfreight schedules to Australia were cancelled with no notice and rescheduled on flight paths to Europe and North American due the advancement of COVID-19 in these regions.

Solution:

Via our industry connections we had already procured factories in Asia, meeting all the Australian requirements, in advance of the Australian Government requirement.

We had secured these factories to be producing medical masks pre COVID-19 outbreak.

The factories had to have all independent, international testing and SGS reports specific to our medical mask requirements.

The criteria also ensured these factories had to verify that they were already exporting to Government or Hospitals pre COVID-19.

The factories were required to be a minimum part state/Government owned in their respective country.

Three factories met these requirements, with the final one selected based on their long history exporting medical masks to Germany. 

We then communicated with the countries Government and officials via our existing relationships to guarantee our schedule and our production would meet our deadlines before committing to a contract. 

This included:

• A guarantee that the production would pass Australian standards, SGS international testing and Australian TGA testing.
• A guarantee the Factory would provide all documentation and ensure prompt export release for air freight and would clear customs in Australian.

It was important that we could be in direct control and in real time communication with the airline during this period.  To manage this we contacted our logistic partners overseas for over two decades to introduce us to, and allow us to deal directly with the airlines in Asia. This also ensured we were provided the true current airfreight cost so we could lock space in advance on secure chartered flights to meet schedules.

This pre logistics process allowed us to secure a direct channel to the airlines and migrate any risk of 3rd party dealings. 

 
Conclusion: 

✔ We were awarded a contract to supply medical masks for the Australia Department of Health.

✔ We produced the medical masks to Australian standards for immediate airfreight into Australia

✔ We completed detailed international 3rd party production testing with SGS and detailed export documentation.

✔ We locked in advance based on our production schedule’s air freight on direct flights to Australia and paid the airlines direct in advance.

✔We staggered volume over pre-arranged flights to ensure our full pre booked allocation was loaded.

✔To further ensure our full allocation was loaded on scheduled flights we requested cartons to be removed from pallets and distributed over the passenger seats and overhead luggage compartments.

✔ We precleared customs for export before inwards to cargo hanger to ensure we met flight loading cut off times.

✔ Ahead of arrival we pre-cleared customs for the flights into Australian as soon as we were in receipt of the airfreight cargo manifest.✔ We delivered as per of Contract under budget.