Roche, GE Share H1N1 Preparedness Strategies

By Leigh Bailey, Freelance Journalist

In April of 2009, headlines worldwide sounded the alarm. With Mexico reporting 24 deaths resulting from the H1N1 virus (better known as “Swine flu”), the media—backed by the Center for Disease Control—predicted a pandemic outbreak of the flu that had the potential to result in mortality rates comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed as many as 100 million. Businesses and government agencies alike prepared for the worst.

But by July, the dire early predictions proved mostly unfounded. The virus—a new strain of influenza A virus subtype H1N1—was both less virulent and less deadly than first feared. While some expressed concern that the virus could still prove deeply disruptive, most heaved a collective sigh of relief.

However according to David Lapre, Vice President of Technical Operations for Roche, the pharmaceutical enterprise, letting down our collective guard is a mistake, and one that could prove very costly.

“According to many experts, we’re overdue as a planet for a devastating viral pandemic”, Lapre explains. “It’s not a matter of ‘if.’ It’s a matter of ‘when.’”

“Before the H1N1 virus - aka ‘Swine flu’ - scare, our big concern was the H5N1 virus - aka ‘Avian flu’, which unfortunately was much more lethal,” he continues. “No one can predict with certainty, but at some point we will experience a strain with a combination of transmissibility and mortality which will bring on an extremely disruptive and dangerous global pandemic.”

In light of what is presumed to be an eventuality, both the CDC and the World Health Organization have strongly advocated that both government agencies and private enterprises develop and maintain “pandemic preparedness plans” to minimize disruption to business as usual.

Roche, as the producer of Tamiflu™, is on the front line of the global response to a flu pandemic. “As a result”, says Lapre, “We’ve been extremely proactive and vigilant in terms of developing viable and functional preparedness plans.” And to encourage other companies to do the same, Roche is sharing the broad outlines of that plan with any enterprise that is interested.

“We’ve put information on the Internet and made ourselves available” to other companies seeking to implement their own pandemic preparedness plan, Lapre says.

Essentially, companies need to determine which critical operations they need to maintain, and create a plan that ensures they have the ability to maintain them.

At Roche, that meant determining which employees were essential to operations, and developing a set of reliable and responsive suppliers who had also developed and tested preparedness plans of their own.

“We stay in contact with our suppliers to discuss demand our production orders, and assess the readiness of the supply chain on a quarterly basis,” he explains. Roche also asks suppliers to meet specific criteria to ensure they are able to meet demand within a certain time frame.

Global Pandemic Meets Global Enterprise

For companies with large, global operations, pandemic outbreaks can pose particularly complex problems.

Bob Weronik, Assistant Chief security Officer for General Electric (GE), says varying responses to H1N1 across GEs theaters of operation required differing risk management responses.

“Because Swine flu has been a global event, GE’s corporate crisis management team has coordinated the GE business crisis management teams across the company,” he explains. “We rely heavily on these teams to tell us what’s going on in their local areas” in creating site-specific risk management plans.

Site-specific plans that take local or national events into consideration are essential, because the threat and the response to the threat can differ significantly from region to region, Weronik continues.

“The response to SARS in China and Taiwan, for example, has been more aggressive than CDC recommendations, because of how hard-hit those areas were in the initial outbreak.” As a result, GE’s operations in these areas need to incorporate local government recommendations and regulations into their planning.

The corporate crisis management team (CMT) at GE continues to hold weekly status updates with operation-specific teams across the globe to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of the steps to be taken in the event of a significant outbreak in their area.

“I think some companies have been lulled into a false sense of security due to the relatively mild symptoms of H1N1, but as a company with more than 300,000 employees and operations world wide, we at GE are taking H1N1 seriously,” he says. “We’ve stayed on it and have been actively monitoring and revising our risk management plans from the beginning.”

Joe McMorrow, program manager with Cisco’s Supply Chain Risk Management team, says the outbreak of H1N1 sent his Manufacturing Crisis Management Team, MCMT, into immediate action. “We have a strong and well connected supply chain risk management program in place, which enabled us to respond very quickly,” he says.

Within forty-eight hours of the Mexican Health Secretary’s announcement that the country was experiencing a flu epidemic, the Cisco MCMT had conducted a risk assessment of affected suppliers and partners in the region and had assembled an incident specific team to mitigate the risk.

“Even now that the immediate threat seems to have passed, at Cisco we continue to actively monitor medical and Government updates from around the world to provide a localized response that supports our employees, customers and business,” McMorrow says.

In this new globally connected economy, companies are facing an increasing array of risks. A serious flu outbreak is just one kind of risk to business continuity, but it’s one that is likely to occur. An effective SCRM strategy, is one that is attuned to the needs of a company’s market and customers, and is a necessity for any global company. The key success factors of any supply chain risk program are; solid commitment from senior management, processes to drive proactive supply chain and product risk mitigation, effective crisis management capabilities, and continuous improvement, to allow the program to adapt and evolve with the business.

Leah Bailey is a Freelance Journalist for the SCRLC Newsletter