 So good afternoon everyone and welcome to the third installment of the COVID-19 ASB webinar series. We intend to discuss through these series issues and insights on the themes related to COVID-19. So in today's webinar, we will discuss on the supply chain considerations for two of the critical industries, medical services and food supply. Welcome to everyone and we will probably start in next one minute as the participants trickle in. And basically we hope from these conversations today, we can trigger some ideas and also insights and feedback on how we can approach these challenges more effectively. Okay, so on this panel for today, I would like to warmly welcome our two panelists. So let me stop sharing the screen so that we can see Professor Fine and Alok on the screen. Professor Charles Fine is our president, CEO and Dean of ASB, and he's also the Chrysler LGO professor for management at MIT Sloan School of Management. He's also the co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program at the MIT Sloan. His area focuses on supply chain strategy and value chain road mapping. Thank you Professor Fine for joining us today. Thank you Selena. And with us today also is Mr. Alok Mishra, who you can see having a really nice vacation by the San Francisco area. See, he's a CEO of value addition, focusing on helping met tech company building capabilities and strategy and marketing. He's recently retired after 20 years in Johnson & Johnson as a senior manager physician and his last role was VP for strategic capabilities, Johnson & Johnson Medical Asia Pacific. Welcome Alok to the session. Thank you. Okay, so I just quick logistic information. Before we start, I just want to announce that this will be a 45 minute session where we'll invite our two esteemed panelists to share their framework and their insight for about 30 minutes or so. And then we will follow up with about 10, 15 minutes Q&A. And please make sure that you can put your questions in the Q&A box down there as you can see the Q&A. And we'll try to process this question as batch and we hope we can try as best as possible to answer all your questions. Okay, so let me start with Professor Fine. Based on the Asian policy report last week, as of 9th April, there were about 15,500 cases in ASEAN for COVID-19. I mean, that's just huge, but not as big as what we've seen in the US and the Europe, but the numbers keep rising. So we know that and we've all experienced here individually that as the numbers of cases rise that each government started to implement the restricted movement control order. And that affected also the supply chain for the food. And we all know right in terms of food security, that's one of the utmost importance to all of us because of the livelihood. The disruption on food supply chain will really cause, potentially cause social unrest. So we felt it's very important to cover that topic today. And I can also share that in terms of pending buying right before the MCO, we all saw that and because of hoarding and what it affected or how it affects the food supply chain. So I'd like to ask you whether you can elaborate in terms of a bit more on the supply chain challenge and how do you look at them. And let me share the slide before you start. Okay. All right. Thank you, Zelina. So, and also thank you to all the people who are logging in and listening into our program today. We're just a tiny bit of theory on supply chain with this little fulcrum that fulcrum that we might think about what kind of challenges we are seeing in the COVID situation and supply chain. And I put here, well, maybe there's not enough supply or maybe there's too much demand. And if we have too much demand, obviously, that's going to cause problems. And if we have not enough supply, and if we have both, that's going to double our problem. So maybe the next slide shares a little bit. So first, let's think about demand. So Zelina, you mentioned panic buying and people hoarding. And so how do we think about that? And so, in fact, there's a whole theory of supply chain and theory of inventory that says, if uncertainty increases, it's natural and normal and optimal for organizations and people to increase their safety stocks. That is, if you don't know whether you're going to have enough food to eat next week, then you might want to store two weeks worth of food rather than one week that you might normally have. So, but if everybody does that, obviously, we have a significantly greater demand than we had in the past. So on the one hand, individually, it might make sense for each person to buy a little bit of extra, but collectively, when we all buy a little bit of extra, we get a very, very large increase in demand. So that's one of the challenges that we face. Second challenges is that the shift in the usage of food as an example. So I don't know the data for Malaysia, but in the United States, only 50% of all food ends up in people's homes and consumed in people's homes. The other 50% of the food supply chain ends up supplying restaurants, entertainment venues, places like Disney World and baseball parks and all kinds of places like that. And so now we've got a shift where instead of 50% of all food being consumed in the home and 50% outside the home, now 100% or close to 100% of being consumed inside the home. And that affects the supply chain because the supply chains, there are often separate supply chains to support industrial users like restaurants as compared to home users. And also the packaging is different and the products are often different. So we have this shift in usage, all of a sudden there's a growth perhaps of almost doubling of the amount of food that people want to consume in their home because they're not consuming outside. And so that multiplies the effect that we see from the first point. So people are increasing the amount they buy because they want more safety stocks and they're also increasing the amount they buy because they're actually going to consume more in their homes and not consume outside as they normally do. A third reason that you get more demand is that because people perceive the cost of being short is higher. So I'll use a medical example rather than a food example for this one, but in normal times, if you run out of face masks, it may not be a life and death situation. Whereas in this COVID situation, running out of face masks could be a life and death situation, particularly for medical workers. And so the cost of being short increases and so if the cost of being short increases, you want to lower your probability of running short and so you buy more. So what we're seeing is that all three of these effects are going on and influencing our supply chain and driving a greater amount of demand on the supply chains that we have. So that's the first thing I think that's worth maybe trying to understand. Next slide please. So this slide is about supply. So how do we think about supply? And so I have a little food example here. Maybe it's simplistic relative to the complexity of many food supply chains, but it gives you the basic idea that we want to look at the whole supply chain. We want to find the weakest links or find the bottleneck. So we can think of the food supply chain as including planting and tending, then harvesting, then some kind of marketplace where the farmers actually sell to wholesalers. Then there might be transportation to a warehouse or a factory. At the factory, we may see food processing or at the warehouse packaging and repackaging. Then we see transportation to a retailer, then some amount of unpacking and putting in displays, then consumer purchase. And then last mile to the consumption point, which might be the consumer buying it and delivering it home themselves, or it could be something like grab bringing the doing the delivery. So we have this multi step supply chain and each of these links potentially has risks. So potentially has needs where we need to look at what are the challenges. So planting and tending tends to be labor intensive. Oftentimes those laborers in many economies are migrant laborers. Some of those people are often housed in places where they're where they're packed tightly together. They may not have the facilities where they can wash their hands and sanitize in the way that we can if we're at home. And so you've got risks of illness in the people who actually do the planting tending and harvesting. When the food goes to market, there's a marketplace where there may be many buyers and many sellers in that marketplace. So people are coming together. If we're imposing social distancing, those markets may not work as well, and we may have challenges there. Transportation to warehouse or factory. So sometimes the transportation is by rail. Sometimes it's by truck. In either case, we have the risk of the workers. These are workers who cannot work from home. They have to work on the job if you will. And oftentimes they can't completely social distance in the way that they operate their transportation system. So we have risks there. And extra management needs to enable these people to be safe with masks, with sanitary processes, with social distancing. Then processing and packaging. Some processing and packaging facilities are very machine intensive, so not a lot of labor. So you can have social distancing, but others are very labor intensive. You have lots of people working together in a closed space. And there, again, we have risks. And if the operators of these facilities are going to practice social distancing, they may have to slow down and reduce the quantity of work that they're able to process. Then again, we have transport to retailer, maybe by truck, maybe by rail, maybe other ways, but same kinds of challenges and risks. Then you have unpacking at the stores, consumer purchase, and already we have data from some countries where grocery store workers have become ill and some of them have lost their lives due to COVID working in the grocery store. And then we've got the last mile to the consumption point. So we have many steps along the chain. Each one of these has a certain amount of cost, requires a certain amount of touch, requires logistics, planning, labor, etc. And to assure those supply chain, we have to assure each of these links. So it's not good enough to just look at some of them. We have to look at all of them. And we want to try to find the weakest link, if you will, make sure the weakest link is strong. So this is, in some sense, the challenge of a long complex chain. Each step has cost and these costs are going to increase if we have to impose social distancing, greater care for the labor and the processes. Can we replace people with technology? Well, maybe somewhat, but this tends to be food supply chains tend to have a lot of physical movement. And it's not, you can't digitally deliver food to customers. You can have digital orders, if you will, maybe digital marketplaces, but there's a lot of physical touch that goes on. And that's going to be a challenge. And now, to add to that challenge, what I said earlier about increases in demand, that is, we've got potentially because of people ordering more, because of the shifts in the supply chain, because of the higher shortage costs, these supply chains are being asked in some sense to carry more weight, to carry more volume, to carry more business just at a time when they're having to reduce their costs. To reduce their capacity because of social distancing and safety. So that's going to put stress on the supply chain. And I'm going to pause here, having sort of laid out the challenges and after Zelina and Alok have a chance to share some of their thoughts, I will, I'll say a little bit about maybe what some of the solutions are to how to address these challenges. Thank you Charlie and thank you for elaborating the supply chain because for and I agree with you in terms of the food supply chain, there's still a lot of physical involvement to push through the whole chain and I think that's going to be a new innovative question that will come out from this COVID-19 in terms of how we can manage that with with all this low touch and social distancing distancing measures that we have to do. And maybe we can come back into before after this with a question and answer, and you can help elaborate a bit more. But for now, I think I just want to go to Alok. In terms of the medical services, we have seen in, you know, right now in the US, even in Malaysia and Singapore with the second wave coming. It's so important to flatten the curve and implementing all the measures to reduce mortality. Of course, one of the most critical thing is to make sure the medical supplies and the PPE the ventilators get to the right patient at the right time. So, and you know in terms of Charlie has explained the the weaklings theory and framework for the food supply chain. So my question to you is, can you share a bit more. What do you think in terms of the medical supply, medical supply chain and what do medical providers need to be thinking about and the second follow up question would be from that framework. Maybe you can share a bit more the different practices by different region of different countries. Thanks a lot. Thanks Alina and thanks Charlie for having me on this panel. If you can go to the next slide so what I'd like to do first is try to put before you the complexities of the medical side of the equation you heard about the food side which is complex enough I think. But when I think about the medical side it is, it's a bit more complex and not just complex it has two additional elements of being first time that the world is looking at something like this, and the sheer magnitude of the problem being so let me talk about this framework this is a poor is a model that created to try to understand medical device markets or medical markets. Because this when it comes to health care or medical practice it's not a product supply it is a service supply with different products which come around that to serve the patient. So the patient is at the center and services and products around that. So what are the elements of that the first one on top which I put there is called access, which means, do I as a patient or as a government have access to what I need to treat the patient and they can be two types of things here one could be the capital equipment. And then there are the consumers to give you an example capital equipment would be do I have hospitals, do I have beds in those hospitals do I have the equipment needed to keep my to sterilize this whole area. And how many can I process so again there's a capacity show you. Then comes the consumables part do I have the consumables needed to treat these patients, and also the health care practitioners, what do they need to do the treatment and Charlie mentioned about masks. There are things which are needed like disinfectants that you've talked about, and the rapidly emerging area of consumables is what medicines will actually work so there are things like chloroquine people talk about as it from my son and a lot of other people working. So the first thing is do I have access to that right so that that's number one. Now, the point is that is not enough because you can have a ventilator but you and I can't do anything with it, you need doctors. So the second part is the adoption part are there trained people who know enough about this science to be able to treat the patients do we have the doctors do we have the nurses. We have the support staff. We have the numbers do we have enough of them right and I'll come to that enough part a little later, because following from this third part is what I generally call awareness because in peace times. It is a, it's quite a problem to get the patient to see a doctor because he doesn't really know what he has and all of that. In case of COVID actually this is a flood right it's a huge number of patients coming through. This is possibly the more complex part for us, because here there are four types of people. One is you and me everyone who is a patient who at the moment, that's what doesn't have COVID. Then you have people who have COVID who don't know they have COVID and they're going and spreading around the infection. There are people who have COVID but yes, and they're sick but they're not sick enough to need ventilators but they need to be segregated into hospitals and finally you have the very sick people. In these four segments, it's a very dynamic field and one of the major tasks we have here is how do I control the number of patients so that I don't overwhelm capacity one and capacity two. Because the moment everyone gets sick, it's going to be a challenge. And then finally, and which is something which is a lot in the news nowadays is can we afford all of this. Do we have the capital equipment. We have the hospitals. We hear about these stories where China put up this hospital within a few days. How will we get all that infrastructure and you see in various countries, people are sort of taking up infrastructure which isn't hospital infrastructure. For example, in Singapore, they started quarantining people in the stadium and hotels because you want to keep these four types of people separate from each other. They're infected, not infected, sick and really sick. So how do you do that? So getting the money for that and then can the patients afford the treatment? Who pays for something like this? It's not the patients doing. And the challenge here is in normal times what you would do is say, okay, I can afford a knee replacement. You know, great. Another one cannot. So he lives in the pain. Yeah, you cannot do that because if you leave a person alone, he will infect everyone else. So it's not so easy to say that if a patient can't afford it, he doesn't get the treatment, we have to find an answer. So that these, when you put these four elements together, the problem gets quite complicated. Now Zalina asked this question is how does this vary across countries to quite frankly, and this is where the whole idea about stay at home and what governments are able to do earlier makes a difference. Because a lot of it depends on how many patients do you have? At what rate are they getting infected? Have you acted in time or not? And people criticize China a lot and nowadays people are criticizing the US. Same happened in Japan and Singapore where initially we were quite okay. So like even up to last week in Singapore, people were going around as the nothing had changed. And then suddenly the numbers started going up. So since this Tuesday, everything has been put into a plan. There's a $300 fine and the next offense is my book. So people are trying to control the numbers because if you don't control it, none of the others will work. You don't have enough hospitals. You won't have enough ventilators. You don't have enough support staff and these support staff start getting overwhelmed. So and if you don't have enough masks, then you won't have enough healthcare practitioner because they're getting infected. So it's a very dynamic problem. And at the same time, the science is evolving. People don't know what will work, whether chloroquine works, erythromycin works and people come up with all sorts of things. It's a pretty complex model, you know, situation. But I would suggest that if you can break these out separately, think about the capital side of it and the consumable side of it in one way. Look at those supply chains and there are strategies to work on it. Maybe we can come to that when we talk about the next month. Then we talk about healthcare practitioners and more and most importantly, how do we control the demand here so that the supply chain doesn't get over. And I think I look in terms of that controlling the demand and that is why it's so important to stay at home and flattening the curve. Exactly. So I was, yeah, so maybe we can talk about this at the moment. So when I talked about these four is surrounding these are the people who do it. So when you come to healthcare, there are five P's and these are the stakeholders. So when it comes to the access part, capital equipment, conjubals, the providers are the hospitals who build infrastructure by the capital equipment. There are former companies who ensure that medicines are supplied and med tech companies who make the masks, the gowns and everything else, which is required debates. So the providers have become very important at this point. So the type of support. So I come to that later. Then you have the physicians. How many do you have? What are the training levels? What type of support can we get to them? Then there are patients. What are their pathways? How do they reach the hospital? How are we able to separate them? And then finally the payers, which could be income levels and reimbursement. What you find when something is like a COVID pandemic gets into play, the most important person, and I put that in the middle of the policymaker, because he's the one who needs to move fastest so that these capacities don't get overwhelmed. Otherwise, those will be built under normal circumstances. A provider will never build a hospital to take care of millions of patients who are infected with a pandemic because the moment that pandemic is over, he has no use for it. Same way, you don't build a physician team to take care of infection. What is needed now is how do I get enough of these capacities to take care of where my country is from the patient point. So what the policymakers can do, for example, regulatory approval. So as soon as COVID treatments are available, how can they fast track their approval? So for example, in the U.S. and the company I work with, Johnson & Johnson is at the cutting edge of that. They have said that a vaccine will be available somewhere in Jan. Now I'm sure everyone is working with them and rooting for them so that they can get it out as fast. In fact, the CEO went online and said I will make the stop and then I wait for regulatory approval because it's such an urgent problem. But you need this cooperation and they need to be able to do that. The other one I put there is diplomatic encouragement because suddenly, if you remember, Trump was talking a lot about chloroquine and that being very important for patients. And India had put in a requirement that they're not going to export any drugs because we need it for our own people. And there's a bit of a tussle between them. A couple of tweets were exchanged and then Modi finally decided, no, I'm going to send this because Trump clearly wants it. So again, the policymaker was very important on their own. People couldn't have got access to it. Similarly, when it comes to physicians, I know Cuba sent a lot of doctors to Italy, a lot of practice. So this is another type of diplomacy where you're able to get help from outside because you yourself don't have enough healthcare practitioners. The other thing which policymakers do here, and this was a very interesting tweaking you saw with the National Health Service in London, where they didn't close down the schools. And the reason they didn't close down the schools is because it would affect the capacity of how many healthcare practitioners come to work. Nurses wouldn't come to work if their children were at home. So it's a very intricate balancing act that they have to do. And no one really knows what is right, what is wrong. It all depends on how are the patients showing up, how is it getting there. About patients, we talked about it. So population movement, this is possibly the biggest contribution the government makes, putting these concepts of lockdown, penalties and stuff. India has gone for 21 days and extended now up to third of March, where people have to stay at home and there are police outside making sure that they don't spread. So if you think about it, what has happened here is you've shifted the capacity required of healthcare practitioners to policemen, which you have a lot of, but they're keeping people healthy by making them stay at home. By force, because there's no time for education right now. If a country of 1.3 billion gets infected, no one on earth can solve that. And similarly on affordability, what type of economic support, different countries are doing different things. The US is actually giving people money, especially the small and medium enterprises. Singapore is given $600 per citizen to take care of this period, which they call the circuit breaker. India is still debating whether testing should be free or not. The Supreme Court says it should be free, then they say, you know, it should be for the poor people. So the point here is it's a very dynamic situation. But the key thing here is trying to stand the patient flow so that the other capacities in the supply chain are not over. Right. So thank you, Alo. So basically the keyword that I'm hearing from both of you is it's a complex system. Right. And you really need to think about and trace the whole chain. That's why it's called chain. So let me go to Charlie. In terms of, you know, we talk about the supply chain, the weakest link, the building resilience. A lot of the question I was just looking at the questions by our participants. I mean, what does that mean to us right now? And how do we build resilience and how does each constituency can play a part? Okay, thank you, Zalina. So to sum up what I said earlier, in some sense, what I said was there's more stress on the demand side for the reasons that I explained, and there's more stress on the supply chain for the reasons that I explained. So we have greater demand and risk to supply. So how do we assure that we keep these chains running? And so to focus on food supply chain in particular, how do we make sure that we can feed everyone in Malaysia and that the government and industry together can do that? And I want to kind of break that into two pieces. One, which relates maybe to international trade, that is how much food might go in and out of Malaysia. And then one might be just domestic. How did the domestic supply chains in Malaysia work? So if you think about the domestic supply chains first. So the picture that I showed earlier, going all the way from farms to transportation to markets to processing to retailers and consumers, I think it's important first just to assess the supply and demand. But to map that supply chain that I described, that if for each commodity that we might have, we want to understand how the supply chain works and where the weak links are as I mentioned earlier, and what the demand has been and what it's likely to be. So I think that's first point. Second point is, I think that the work has to be adjusted, as I mentioned, partly to protect workers, but probably we need more workers. That is, the capacity is going to have to be increased at a number of these points. And that's not an instantaneous process. On the one hand, we have many people who are being pushed out of work and losing their jobs or being put on unemployment. On the other hand, as I've described, I think the food supply chain actually is going to need more people because the productivity is going to go down. If you have to have the social distancing, if you have to have some people put into quarantine for periods of time, you're going to need more people in that chain. So in the very short term, I think we want to think about how do we deploy more labor into this system in a safe way, that the amount of labor that historically has been in this chain just left to itself will have more challenges to deliver the food required given the increased demand and the increased pressures on supply. So industry has to assess this, understand their labor needs, their capacity needs, their demand needs. And then I think the government also has a role to play that to ask every farm to go out and procure masks for themselves, given the shortages of masks to ask the farms to overnight provide more capacity for social distancing of the workers. A lot of these are small farms, a lot of these are small operations that work their way up into the supply chain. And I think the government can help. So I put it under government help businesses strengthen the weak links. So if the weak links are we need more labor, can the government help look at the labor situation? Who's being thrown out of work? Where can they be more helpful? What skills that we need in the food supply chains are actually being underutilized in other supply chains and can be redeployed. I think the government also has a role to play in reducing the uncertainty that I said earlier. More uncertainty means people want to store more. They tend towards hoarding. So the government has to play a role and I think the Malaysian government was very, very clear very early on saying there's plenty of food for everybody. You don't have to strip the store as clean. We're going to be able to to feed everyone and I think the government has to reassure people of that but then also back those words up by monitoring the supply chain understanding where the weak links are seeing where the private sector supply chain is struggling and then trying to add more capacity and more help. In some sense, in the same way that the government has brought the army in to help the police force to support the MCO, the government needs to think about these critical supply chains are there places that that we can help that we can help strengthen these weaker links. So that's all on the domestic side. If we think about the international trade, obviously Malaysia imports a certain amount of food and also exports a certain amount of food. Some countries have have reported that they're going to reduce exports. Other countries have increased their purchases from outside. Broadly speaking, international trade tends to be good for feeding people that that it's, it's, it's helpful to be able to bring food into the country and you look at for example, Australia New Zealand that might have a lot of dairy farms for example, and some of that dairy material foods get brought to Malaysia. So we want to continue to have that be possible in exchange. Malaysia needs to underscore the benefits of being able to to maintain trade in food and medical products and other things. So that's another role a government can play is is to try to reinforce the value of trade and being able to maintain these supply chains and get the support. I think on the consumer side I put stay calm and stay home right so don't panic. I do think the Malaysian government has done a very very solid job so far of managing this disaster. I think that the, the stay at home policy, the MCO policy has been the right policy for Malaysia. It's been well enforced and I think that that reinforces that people can can feel comfortable and safe that they can stay home, stay calm if they stay home. Obviously there are many people who don't have comfortable homes may to be locked in and also can't work from home. And so those people need support and they need incomes and to the extent that the food supply chain may need more labor. It's worth trying to understand how to make that go as well. So let me pause there. There's more to say but but we can maybe get some more comments from the local and Selena and then maybe take some some of the questions. Thank you, Charlie. Alot, do you want to say something before I move to the Q&A? Yeah, so I think Charlie has covered quite a bit in that but couple of areas where I've seen governments working and partnering very well with providers is to improve the supply of medical equipment. For example, if you remember one of the biggest things being talked about was was these PPP and face shields and stuff. So I know that in Malaysia, Rotan is making 60,000 face shields. Then you've got Foxconn in the US making ventilators. Many car companies have repurposed their lines to start making ventilators. So the whole idea right now is that the world for the first time I guess is working as a team and we need to get as much help as possible to solve some of these problems. The other thing which I think we need to do a bit more is to keep our healthcare workers safe because we don't keep them safe. I think all of us will be in a lot of trouble because right now it is not about treating one patient. It's about how you treat a whole population and the only way it can get back is if we can start identifying those people who've been through this, who have their antibodies, can go back to work safely. But being able to segregate needs needs, very careful segmentation using testing, work testing for antigens, antibodies, and then keeping them separate till you can solve the problem. So I think there's a lot that the government can do and at the moment I think most of the countries I would say are trying to do their best to the extent they can given their sizes and given the resources. Thank you Alo. So you mentioned just now that the testing for the new drug or new vaccine will be quite a while and the outlook is probably as fast or next year right. So since we are looking at them just looking at some of the questions here basically it's going to be a while it's not going to be one or two months. So what that means is this is going to be a new normal for quite a while for more at least more than six months a year. So based on the supply chain that Charlie and Alo have mentioned, both of you, would you like to offer your thoughts on how can we recreate or reinvent the new business model for the supply chain and there were a lot of questions from the participants about Yeah, we can reallocate the resources on the label like what Charlie mentioned, but sometimes what if these people are infected right how then we can utilize more of technology and to help lessen that impact and the risk Charlie do you want to start first. Sure, thank you. So I think one has to break this into what can we do immediately. What can we do in the short term that is maybe in the next few months and what are some of the longer term things that we can do right so I was focused a little bit more on the immediate immediately we need to protect the workers we get mass to the workers create more separation, try to find more labor where we where we have problems monitor the data, strengthen the weak links that that in the immediate term it's going to be hard to deploy technological solutions like more automation and food processing plants or or self driving trucks and things like that I think me those reduce the labor but but those are not going to be deployed in the immediate term right in the in the in the next say three to six months. I think we certainly can do maybe a more comprehensive job of mapping these supply chains of getting better data on where are the weak links on where are the shortages where the where the needs. Where can we redeploy more workers where where can we apply technology that that can make a difference but but that we've got to sort of get things under control first and partly being under control is controlling the the health of the people in the current chain so I didn't mention tests and trace earlier but obviously if you've got something like a food processing plants. You want to know if anybody in that plant is infected because you don't want everyone in that plant to be infected so so having very careful checking of the health and health monitoring of all those workers in these critical chains is super important and obviously my senses around the world hospitals are doing a really good job of this that has hospitals are main are have the capability and the knowledge to be able to monitor consistently the health status of the people who work in the hospitals and work in the medical supply chains. I think the food supply chain more vulnerable in that sense because the food supply chain people aren't experts in monitoring the health of their workers and our experts in in understanding all the dimensions of the health concerns so they need help there the food supply chain needs help from the medical supply chain in some sense to keep their people healthy so their technology can help right so a test and trace monitoring who's sick whose quarantine as a look mentioned who's already been through the disease and has antibodies so that they can safely go to work and not be worried about reinfection that can make a difference as well so so I think that's that's an important component. You want to add something before I move on to the next question from the next one I see we got a whole bunch of questions. So what I like about this about that there's a question about, you know, what we've realized after COVID-19 outbreak started, we all were pushed to accelerate our digital adoption right digital transformation and the case in point is this webinar where we actually have to go virtual. And that also means that we have to start thinking about paperless contact less if and we've also seen some of the Cameron Highlands farmers that go straight to market via lasada. And how do we in the question is how do you adapt to the do normal is there anything else that that you haven't covered in your in your discussion just now Charlie, they want to offer. So there are probably millions of details. I do think I mean if you if you mentioned something specific like the farmers in Cameron Islands. I think it was well popularized that there was a situation where the food was not able to be harvested in time and and that got brought to people's attention that that we need to make sure the supply chains are open the transportation lines are open, as well as the harvesting people are open so process providing that information having it centralized having and then being able to deploy resources against identified shortages and challenges is part of what information technology can do well. I mean, they more broadly. So prior to the COVID breakout, there was a very strong theme in in business writing broadly about the replacement of human beings by automation. And so you might say well gee, if if if all of our supply chains are already automated on all of our factories are already automated than perhaps we wouldn't have the problems that we have in supply chains today but I think I think as people are realizing humanity needs humanity, people need work people need their social environment of work. And I don't know that everybody wants to be in a world where the robots do everything and the computers do everything for us. And so, I think we're seeing a very strong streak of people saying, I want our human I want humanity to come back to where it was and our social environments to to be reestablished and and we don't want to all just live in our in our own rooms and live on our computers, if you will, and our phones but we want to socialize and interact and work with other people. So, so I think we have maybe some economic and technological pushes towards more and more automation. But I think we have a human humanistic streak towards wanting to bounce that against what people need to to to be satisfied to be happy with their lives. And I agree with that in terms of the word is really augmentation right and how can technology help augment the processes, but not taking away the human part of it. I think the question is more, because of the current situation how do we then make sure I like the, the idea that you talk about, you know how you immediate term is we must protect our workers right the workers the frontline is that's the first thing we need to do, and be able to effectively test and trace and also quarantine them if we find one case that's super important to ensure that the first, the point of the supply does not get disrupted, and that's So do you want to add any more in terms of from the medical supply chain. You know, if there is any ways you mentioned all this complex parameters and also the how we also have to make sure that how the UK schools have opened because they want to make sure the healthcare providers stay available right so in your assessment at least specific to this region. What are the one or two factors that you see lagging behind and you mentioned just now that you need to control the demand and I think we understand that but from the supply chain is there anything that you want to you find in the red alert situation. Nothing in particular but what I find is a very peculiar phenomenon nowadays and you hear about it now and then that medical supplies are being hijacked by the highest bidder. Now that does affect some of the countries in our region not everyone has got a high amount of income. So they have to start thinking about how do they take care of, you know, situations like this and I've even, you know, been involved in some forums were looking at, is there a way of reprocessing some of the things which we normally consider as consumables can but can I at least analyze mask versus someone going without a mask, you know, so those are the type of choices people have to make, and it all depends on the volume. If it is manageable, you're okay but the moment it overwhelms the healthcare system, the capacity and the healthcare practitioners, I think there can be a huge amount of chaos all these numbers we see those ratios won't hold. So it's quite a serious situation and I think in some countries also I have seen that the government wasn't that quick to really enforce, you know, stay at home type of policies and all of that and that can cost you quite a lot in terms of what capacity you need. So I think that is very important. The other thing I'd like to add is to the business model side is, I think, and we are in the medical side are very used to that. The rest of the world, especially when it's using talking about supply chains where one thing is made for consumption by someone else will need to start using the same type of protocols and processes which we use, which we have been using first that whole quality control system will have to start seeing not just whether someone was infected, but whether the infection has been passed over so not just testing for human being, but testing in products. Is there, you know, a form I did is there some virus which has been passed on to my can food, we will have to think very differently and to be safe in future. And it can be quite a different world and I think that is where automation and other things come in to look at those risky areas and maybe try to automate those, while the others where the human touch is important can continue. I agree. And, and both of you brought up a very important question issues, especially on the international trade and availability of the raw materials and we've seen the N95 mask being basically fully utilized and halted by the US and that that left the Malaysian front line is with two weeks worth of PPEs for the N95 mask so it's real right so I think for for the participants and who are in the health care and the medical sector is also important to think about how else can we reinvent like you said a look in how do you then reprocess the consumables in absence of what the ideal model or product is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. On the third question I what I'm doing is I'm going through the top. Sorry, Charlie. I just want to maybe to add a tiny bit more so I see we have a lot of really great questions and I think what we'll have to do is some of them will answer in writing and we'll post them on our website afterwards because we can't possibly address them all. I see there's a couple here about rail transport and I wanted to make one comment about rail transport which in some sense you could think of rail I think is a more automated solution than trucks in the sense that you can you can transport a lot more material with the same amount of labor in a rail system as opposed to a trucking system because the rails just have higher capacity and so in a time where labor is a challenge and transportation is a challenge perhaps rail actually has a larger role to play. And we should be aware that having these multiple channels that is not dependent on just one channel just trucks for example is critical. So you think about an automated system like so I'm saying rail is more automated than than trucks that is more higher productivity per person. But then the issue is how important it is to protect each of those individual people who are on that chain, because there are fewer of them right. So think about any automated system has fewer workers but each of those workers in some sense is more critical because they're controlling a larger amount of total productivity so that says the more automated your systems are the more critical every individual worker that you have is and so you've got to spend even more effort on protecting those people that you've got because the people who tend these automated systems if they go down and then then you can't maintain the automated systems, then you're in even bigger trouble. So so I think that's something to think about with that automated systems maybe have more productivity, but they're more fragile in the sense that if a small number of people go down in the automated system, all system may go down. Whereas a labor intensive system you lose a small number of people, you have lots of labor that can keep it going so so so that's another consideration that one would want to think about with an automated system. Yeah that's a good point and good at. Thank you Charlie. And I'm mindful of the time is just seems like the time flies by very quickly when we're having fun and we are already at the end of the session, let me. I didn't, I just want to sorry I just didn't click the Q&A but I think there's 334 questions that are very good question and we will try to collect them and also see what area that we can add more in terms of the article be after this. And just before that I just wanted to summarize some of the key points that that we've talked about today, you know, it's very clear that the stress that we see in the supply changes because of that sudden increase in demand that's unprecedented we did not foresee that I mean there's no way that you can always you can plan this pandemic and also the availability of supply and and just to also reiterate Charlie's framework in terms of looking at the the weakest link that's important and as we go through and re re look at reassess our business model in this sense. We talked about the fall east framework for the medical supplies and how you know when we look at this whole strategy going forward and how do we address the new normal. We need to bucket it into immediate terms where we just need to we need to make sure we protect the workers first and and also then what's next in the three to six months and then six to one years time and how then we can adopt and implement technology and but also be mindful of the pros and cons of each technology versus labor cost. So, I think you for these two panelists Charlie and do you have any parting remark before we close the session. So, first of all, I want to thank a local Zalina for being partners in this and also Dr ton and our whole team for putting this program together, and all of our other participants who logged in and listened. The main point I would reiterate is our supply chains are under pressure. That requires that we look carefully at them we map them we understand the weakest links and we have to work together industry and government to shore up those weak links and and and try to to put resources where where where they're going to make the biggest effect to change the integrity of these chains. Yeah, so thanks a lot Charlie for having me here and Zalina for forgetting me on this panel. The only thing I'd like to say is from a medical point of view quite frankly, unfortunately, we are the very beginning, we don't even have a treatment at the moment. All efforts are at the moment, focused on trying to keep people safe and more preventive. But we don't really have a treatment. And when we do have that treatment talking about the world with 7 billion people. That is going to be an unimaginable supply chain issue. How do you produce how do you get these people to get vaccinated and how do you then make the whole world safe so unfortunately we're right at the beginning of some of these areas and it's not going to be easy but all I can say is, as far as everyone on this panel and this session is concerned, stay safe and spread the message around that we need to try our best. Thank you. I love that closing remark. It's super important that we all play our part and stay home and stay safe and making sure that we don't overload the capacity of our hospitals right and and we are hopeful people say that crisis is also in the community. So we're hopeful that the vaccine can be found or the whole the global medical and scientists are working around the clock to, to make sure and to go find this this vaccine, and to think about how we can then after this to distribute the supplies of this vaccine is also another consideration. So thank you for highlighting that as well. So before we end this session I just wanted to ask for participants assistance to also do the survey link. There's a survey to answer the survey we have a survey link here on the on the screen, especially as we build a more session in the future so it will be very helpful in fact one of the sessions that we have. I mean all the sessions we have here are also based on the feedback from the past participants so we really appreciate all your question I'm sorry I can't really cover all 38 good questions here, but we will aim to summarize them and share with all of you after this. So we'll stay tuned for the next session next week and stay safe and have a good day. Thank you. Thank you.