May 1, 2020
P&G External Business Partners:
The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to reinforce the strength of our relationships. Through the past several weeks, our entire Ecosystem has overcome infinite number of obstacles while maintaining the majority of our supply chains operational. This has successfully allowed us to keep our and your employees safe and to continue serving P&G’s consumers and customers around the world. I’m extremely thankful to all of you for your outstanding partnership.
And as always, every challenge comes with an opportunity. The COVID-19 crisis has also forced us to do things differently, with immense agility and openness to new ideas, among many others. These are learnings we want to capture and ideally carry-on in the future.
To do so, we have posted a survey in the Supplier Portal and I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to participate. It is extremely important for me to hear your comments and how we get stronger together, after COVID. The survey, “Getting Stronger after COVID 19 - Survey for External Business Partners” was posted yesterday in our Supply Portal and asks for your reply no later than Tuesday May 5, 2020. You can also directly access the Survey through this link.
This weekly update provides overall information regarding plans for return-to-P&G sites. This applies to sites where employees have been working from home such as General Offices and Technical Centers.
The safety and health of all working at our facilities remains the utmost priority. Work is actively underway to enable a return to P&G Locations in a safe, coordinated and phased-in approach, based on early learning and proven protocols from China and our manufacturing sites. The execution will vary by P&G site but the general planning considerations are as follows:
- Our processes and decisions will be criteria-driven and principle-based.
- We will follow government regulations, recognizing they will differ by region, country and locality. Safety of people is and always will be, our top priority. We will implement proven protocols which have demonstrated that we can operate in a safe way.
- As we re-open offices and innovation centers, we will do so gradually, and it won’t be the same as before. Masks, temperature checks, distancing, lower density environments, increased cleaning, site signage, etc., will be the near-term norm.
- We will all need to change our behavior for our own and others’ safety.
Timings will vary by site based on local conditions and readiness, including government requirements and protocols. We anticipate gradual returns, over weeks or sometimes months, depending on a site’s situation. You can expect regularly adjusted plans as conditions change.
We will all play an important role in creating a safe environment and we appreciate your commitment to following and observing the safety procedures and protocols that will be put in place in every one of our P&G sites.
If you have questions about specific protocols to be followed by on-site contractors or on-site providers, please contact your Purchases P&G Relationship Owner. We ask for your patience as we navigate this new phase in the journey, we are committed to continue sharing the information once available, including the anticipated time frame for your employees to return.
On a separate but related note, we would like to ask that you prepare yourselves for what we expect to be a normal requirement to conduct business, things like having masks and hand sanitizers available to your employees. Ensuring you have these type of essentials and making proactive arrangements to get them on time will help to keep our supply chains running.
The key developments below will continue to keep you up to speed on the COVID-19 developments around the world.
We are very thankful for your partnership and appreciate all you are doing during these times.
Best Regards,
Ana Elena Marziano
P&G Chief Purchasing Officer