CSCM and lockdown

At 11.59pm on the Wednesday 25 March, New Zealand went into level four lockdown as a result of the potential for a pandemic from the as yet little known strain of coronavirus, COVID-19.

In the words of the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, “If community transmission takes off in New Zealand the number of cases will double every five days. If that happens unchecked, our health system will be inundated, and thousands of New Zealanders will die.”

Two and half months later, at time of writing, New Zealand has fared well in terms of COVID-19 fallout with a total of only 22 deaths. Alert level four restrictions meant people needed to stay at home, that schools and universities would be closed, and that non-essential businesses, health services, air travel and public transport would only be used for essential services. Something completely novel and unpredictable was occurring.

With nearly five million people in this unprecedented lockdown in New Zealand and an estimated 2.6 billion in lockdown globally what would be the impacts and consequences on the economy, global trade and supply chains?

This question was, and continues to be, at the forefront of The Centre of Supply Chain Management’s mind. As a centre for research and thought leadership in supply chain, we felt it vital to provide our stakeholders and the supply chain sector with up-to-date insights, information and solutions but also to keep people engaged and help counter the isolation of working from home.

CSCM decided to try something never done by us before by organising weekly webinars related to the impacts of COVID-19 with an emphasis on supply chains. To begin with it was a steep learning curve as we were working it out as we went along, making and rectifying several mistakes especially on the technology front, but with these issues overcome we continued on with a good degree of success.

Out of a total of ten weeks, CSCM was able to organise eight engaging webinars with 11 different speakers and an average of 86 people attending each presentation. Presentations were recorded and published, with the PDF version of slides on the CSCM events page.

It would be outside of the scope of this article to summarise each presentation but we are very grateful to and would like to thank the speakers who generously gave of their time and expertise:

• Professor Prasana Gai from the University of Auckland Business School who presented ‘The Macroeconomics of Pandemics. This Time is Different.’
• Mark Singh from Indushaze who presented ‘The Impact of COVID-19 on New Zealand Supply Chains and Actions to Take.’
• Alan Day from State of Flux who presented ‘COVID-19, Implementing Supplier Management at Speed.’
• Professor Tava Olsen from the University of Auckland Business School who presented ‘Supply Chain Theory and Projections for COVID-19 Spell Volatility Ahead.’
• Professor Ilan Oshri from the University of Auckland Business School who presented ‘The Impact of COVID-19 on the IT Sourcing Industry.’
• Matt Ball, Craig Sain and Reinhold Goeschel from Ports of Auckland who presented ‘Ports of Auckland View of a Changing World’, ‘World and NZ Shipping’ and ‘Supply Chain Impacts and Opportunities.’
• Associate Professor Fernando Oliveira from the University of Auckland Business School who presented ‘COVID-19 and the Case for Strategic Petroleum Reserves.’
• Sharne Usherwood and Bruce Ravesloot from KPMG who presented ‘Supply Chain Resilience in the Context of COVID-19.’

Although New Zealand is seemingly out of the woods from a COVID-19 health perspective, the question now is how long the tail of the economic and supply chain impacts will be. In this light, CSCM will continue to provide you with insights and opportunities to engage with us and the Business School, and we invite you to stay connected.