City Pharmacy Limited (CPL) Board Chairman, Mahesh Patel, says the fire that gutted their warehouse has in some way strengthened the unity and camaraderie of staff and management.
He said there remains positivity despite the fire destroying months of supplies and displacing almost 300 staff.
The CPL warehouse, which services 30 – odd pharmacies around the country and 10 supermarkets, burnt to the ground in the early hours of Monday morning.
In an interview with TVWAN, Patel said the board and management is currently taking stock of the damage and should be able to determine within the next couple of weeks the extent of losses.
He said they also had to re-deploy some staff while others have been told to stay home.
“Initially, the main important thing is how we re-deploy our staff. We had almost 300 people working at Gerehu. So we’ve set up temporary offices right around Port Moresby at the moment, about three or four of them.
“Some staff have been sent home because there is no work to be done, but sent home temporarily, they’re still on our payroll and we will still redeploy them in time.
“And then we’re just rebuilding our software at the moment from the updates of the backup so that’s up and running and the main thing is to make sure the stores are all open, which it is since Monday.
“It’s really the back end support of rebuilding the inventory and getting the supply chain back in line.”
Patel added that they lost a lot of their fleet as wel, including their records.
“A lot of our supplies are paper based still, even though we are electronic, we still maintain paper. And that’s going to be a long time to recoup. We will recoup that but it’s a matter of going back and pulling the information from all the IT systems.”
Patel said it is a challenge but he is confident in his management team’s experience in addressing a similar disaster two years ago, where fire gutted their newly built Stop ‘N’ Shop retail shop at Central Waigani.
“We will take stock of what we need to do, what’s missing, what’s lost in the fire, what we need to recoup and making sure the staff are settled because we’ve got people who grew up with the company, they are in shocked state at the moment. “So we just need to make sure that we do counseling we give them assurances that jobs will continue on.”
Patel said in 2015, it took them only two months to set up the second store at the old site.
“And full credit has to go to the management and the team. We’ve got a fantastic group of people. And we had our first meeting yesterday morning, everybody’s positive, and it’s sort of strengthened our unity, camaraderie around our team,” he said.
The PNG Fire Service continued to work throughout yesterday and today to put out persistent fire pockets.
At this stage, it is still unclear as to how the fire started.