Identifying PPE Suppliers During the Pandemic

Pain Points

To identify sources of PPE to help combat COVID-19, the procurement team wanted to evaluate detailed international trade flows to:

• Monitor overall buying-selling activities for PPE to better understand global trends.
• Identify trusted manufacturers and suppliers of PPE that could serve the region, given the shortage.
• Evaluate the businesses, client rosters, and shipment history of PPE suppliers that had contacted the agency, but were not well known.

The team realized that these types of investigations would be extremely time consuming and wanted to find a provider of supply chain intelligence data that could deliver:

• A comprehensive database that captured current trade flows to and from multiple countries.
• A search capability to quickly identify particular firms and their product lines.
• Automated reporting to share shipment and customer details with other stakeholders in the county.
• Company profiles to vet a potential supplier’s financial performance.
• Contact information at buying firms to further the due diligence of suppliers.

S&P Global Market Intelligence (“Market Intelligence”) was asked to discuss its capabilities in the international trade arena.

The Solution

The Panjiva solution from Market Intelligence brings transparency to global trade through import and export transaction details, with information on buyers and sellers, product descriptions, dollar values, and more. The robust offering would enable the procurement team to:

Assess detailed import and export data

The platform provides access to over 1 billion transaction records, 13 million company-to-company relationships, and approximately 40% of global merchandise traded by dollar value.1 The records include importer and exporter company names, product details, dollar values, harmonized international trade (HS) codes, and more.

Search for specific companies and products

With powerful search and mapping tools on the Panjiva platform, the procurement team could quickly identify particular companies and products of interest. In addition, personalized dashboards provide customized visuals of relevant data, enabling users to automatically see updates as they become available. This would help spot trends in supplier data to bolster the public health provider’s supply of PPE.

Create detailed reports

Export and import shipment reports for buyers, suppliers, and trends can be automatically generated by selecting a product name and country. Reports include date, shipper, destination, and more.

Evaluate the business activities of suppliers

Company-specific details include location, current trading partners, shipping volume year-over-year, revenue, employee count, and more to help assess the size and performance of different firms.

Contact peer organizations

Company-specific details enables users to enhance their due diligence of prospective suppliers.

Key Benefits

Members of the procurement team saw many benefits to subscribing to the Panjiva offering, including the ability to:

• Save time by automating data gathering with extensive information on import and export activity around the world.
• Quickly identify product shipments by company to evaluate the business models of potential suppliers.
• Validate the purchasing history of U.S.-based companies to confirm that suppliers had established relationships with similar government organizations to provide PPE.
• Use contact information at buyers to better understand their experience with suppliers.