A year ago, our introduction began by talking about Covid-19 — the greatest contemporary global crisis to face humankind — and its spread around the world, and the concomitant knock-on effects on logistics services. So it is with a certain grim satisfaction that this year it begins by talking about the Covid-19 vaccines — surely our greatest logistics challenge ever.
Planning the co-ordinating and securing the distribution of a temperature-sensitive product to roughly 5bn people (two-thirds of the global population, give or take a few hundred million) is too great a challenge to explore in adequate detail over just two pages, but we give it a shot.
If the pandemic itself was a wake-up call for logistics providers around the world, then vaccine distribution is a test of their capabilities. Safety and security will obviously be key — but this is an area in which SA faces unusual challenges. It will also require the flexible upscaling and downscaling of operations enabled by elastic logistics.
Warehousing capacity and management will also be tested, which is where a good warehouse management system can come in handy. In times of crisis it’s difficult to focus on nice-to-haves. But with sustainability increasingly a non-negotiable, reducing carbon emissions in the sector is vital, and there’s increasing focus on sustainable, recyclable and reduced packaging.
Hopefully, considerations around sustainability can be built into the vaccine distribution programme, so that when the dust settles, we don’t lurch straight from this crisis into another one.
Anthony Sharpe
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