The Blue Team

CHAPTER 1. The Lockdown

During the confinement period, what the Covid-19 crisis showed us (besides that the pc charger is never where you left it, creating hot spot takes more than 3 min, and wifi in Fontainebleau is a myth), is how fragile the healthcare system is.

As countries entered lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’, the importance and the fragility of the supply chain of Healthcare Urgent Response Items became apparent, highlighted by the intense shortage of ICU beds and basic PPE.

This motivated the us to start investigating the situation to better understand the major causes and the bottlenecks in the system. Quite rapidly, it became evident that the system was overburdened by bottlenecks, from critical supplies such as PPE and ventilators, to workforce numbers, frontline staff and manufacturing and distribution. Moreover, the system seemed highly dependent on offshore production or a limited geographical area for manufacturing or sourcing raw materials with redundancy built into the system.

All the factors mentioned above, have made it very prone to any of the destabilising factors known as the four P’s: Powerful weather, Pandemic, Port closures and Political instability. Pre-COVID-19, these disruptions have only led to inconveniences, but during COVID-19 these disruptions have demonstrated the importance of having an agile and flexible supply chain. With this knowledge in mind, we – the Blue Team –  backed by Hoffmann Institute and supervised by Professor Stephen Chick,  aim to assess the gaps of the urgent supply chain response and hopefully find solutions that address them.

Our goal is to have a better understanding of what the opportunities are for start-ups in supply chain when it comes to urgent supply chain/relief control, as well as, how start-ups can improve the agility, flexibility and responsiveness of the current healthcare supply chain components from production, capital productivity, purchasing, product development and planning.

With this ambitious goal on the horizon, armed with enthusiasm and curiosity, the Blue team officially kicks-off the 2020 Start-up Tour journey in Paris, France!