It is crazy out there for procurement agent
Coronavirus crisis makes unlikely heroes: State procurement officials scrambling for supplies — and hoping not to get scammed
Senior Political Correspondent
April 10, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC
WASHINGTON — Danny Mays has a phrase for the way things used to be, before thousands of Americans started
from COVID-19 and everyone else stayed in their homes: blue-sky days.
Mays, 36, is the director of procurement for the state of Maryland. Until a month ago, that job meant he was making deals for the state on everything from construction jobs to software and technology. But now it’s all medical equipment, all the time.
Mays’s job has shifted into overdrive, as he and the 38 people who report to him have scrambled to compete with other states and countries in a mad dash to obtain medical supplies: N95 respirators, surgical masks, gloves and gowns, ventilators and face masks.
In an hourlong interview, Mays described days that start at 7 a.m. with the first of several conference calls, and stretch late into the night as he and others try to nail down deals with suppliers for products that are mostly manufactured in China. The U.S. imports
. The 12-hour time difference means a lot of his most important work starts in the evening. “There is no 9-to-5 anymore.”
“In blue-sky days the state doesn’t prepay for anything,” Mays said. “In China right now to secure orders, we’re seeing 50 percent or more deposits required to secure these orders. If you don’t get into that space and compete in that space, then New York is going to get the items or Florida is going to or someone is.”
Costs are skyrocketing. “Pricing on ventilators is through the roof,” Mays said. They’ve gone from $18,000 each to $50,000 a pop. In a normal year, a blue-sky year, Mays said his office will spend about $1 billion on all the contracts he executes. He said it will spend that much, easily, just on the coronavirus crisis.
His office has to field a flood of inquiries from would-be middlemen without experience in medical supplies, seeking to cash in on the bonanza — or just to keep their businesses alive.
“We’re getting hundreds of vendors hitting us up every hour telling us they can sell us what we need, and we know that’s not true given how volatile the supply chain is,” Mays said. “Event management companies … now they’re going to their suppliers that usually make touring equipment and scaffolding and saying, ‘Do you have any suppliers who make N95 masks?’”
