Inside the Story of How H-E-B Planned for the Pandemic... For you Yankees, H-E-B is a San Antonio based grocery store chain

[Tour2ma]

This is how it's done.

You plan, you practice, you organize under singular, mission-focused leadership reporting to the highest levels of an organization.

Yes, the above is a commentary on how the Epidemic Response Team in the NSC was screwed up.

 

This article is from Texas Monthly... a full blown print magazine and a good one at that. As such it's long... much longer than what appears here.

I've pulled bits to give you the flavor of the article... and make a few points along the way.

Link to full article is at the bottom.

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Inside the Story of How H-E-B Planned for the Pandemic

The grocer started communicating with Chinese counterparts in January and was running tabletop simulations a few weeks later. (But nothing prepared it for the rush on toilet paper.)

By Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes

Date Mar 26, 2020

San Antonio-based H-E-B has been a steady presence amid the crisis. The company began limiting the amounts of certain products customers were able to purchase in early March; extended its sick leave policy and implemented social distancing measures quickly; limited its hours to keep up with the needs of its stockers; added a coronavirus hotline for employees in need of assistance or information; and gave employees a $2 an hour raise on March 16, as those workers, many of whom are interacting with the public daily during this pandemic, began agitating for hazard pay.

Before the Outbreak

Justen Noakes, director of emergency preparedness, H-E-B: Just a little bit of history: we have been working on our pandemic and influenza plan for quite a while now, since 2005, when we had the threat of H5N1 overseas in China. That’s when we first developed what our plan looked like, [as well as] some of our requirements and business implications. In 2009, we actually used that plan in response to H1N1, when the swine flu came to fruition in Cibolo, and refined it, made it more of an influenza plan. We’ve continued to revise it, and it’s been a part of our preparedness plan at H-E-B ever since. 

Craig Boyan, president, H-E-B: Justen leads our emergency preparedness with a group of folks, and that is a full-time, year-round position. We are constantly in a year-round state of preparedness for different emergencies. We keep emergency supplies at almost every warehouse and have water and other supplies staged and ready to go and kept in storage to make sure that we are ready to [react quickly] when a crisis emerges, whether it be a hurricane or a pandemic. We take being a strong emergency responder in Texas, to take care of Texas communities, very seriously. 

Justen Noakes: So when did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue. We’ve got interests in the global sourcing world, and we started getting reports on how it was impacting things in China, so we started watching it closely at that point. We decided to take a harder look at how to implement the plan we developed in 2009 into a tabletop exercise. On February 2, we dusted it off and compared the plan we had versus what we were seeing in China, and started working on step one pretty heavily.

Preparing Employees

Justen Noakes: One of the biggest things we’ve looked at is what are the impacts to their employees? How they dealing with the health of their employees? We’re very interested in what’s happening in the supply chain world, and the products that are being affected. How are they running their stores when they’re impacted by absenteeism? We’re trying to get answers so we can get ahead of this and really understand how the overall operations of their companies are being impacted.

Command Central

Justen Noakes: We activated our Emergency Operations Center in San Antonio on March 4 [the EOC is run out of H-E-B’s new 1.6 million-square-foot super-regional warehouse]. The driving factor behind that is when we see even a potential upswing in customer activity due to one of these events. The Emergency Operations Center at H-E-B is a collection of the most impacted areas of the company, and the leaders in those areas are brought together to make streamlined decisions and collaborate together on a daily basis. That’s almost every area of the company, so we’ve got a lot going on in our emergency operations center right now. It’s very busy.

Trying to Keep Up

Craig Boyan: When a hurricane happens, it’s in an isolated part of the country. We’re quite good at pulling product from around the rest of the country and feeding it to Texas. That is much more difficult in a pandemic, where every area of the country is under real stress. So our suppliers, where we’re getting paper towels from, our wipes, our hand sanitizer, are getting hit from all retailers, and we are seeing much higher levels of out-of-stock [goods] as a result. We’re working really hard to be creative in how we source product when the supply chain is under real pressure.

In early March, retailers around the country started seeing shortages of common household products, and H-E-B began limiting quantities that customers could purchase on a single trip. 

The Great Unknowns

Justen Noakes: We’re here to take care of our partners, take care of our customers, take care of our community. So I think that that’s really our number one focus, and what we’re really trying to do is to meet those objectives—but I will tell you that the challenge of it is the longevity. With a hurricane, you can see the wind coming, you can see the rain. You can see an end in sight. We’ve been having conversations about how this equates to Harvey, and although the need is very similar … there is not really a clear end in sight on when we think we will be out of this. On a twice-daily basis, we’re monitoring trends in Europe and China, so we can forecast an estimate on when we think we’ll be out of this. But unlike a hurricane, we just can’t see it

 

https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/