In times of crisis — every minute counts.
And when the COVID-19 pandemic took America by storm in March 2020, Public Spend Forum got to work. We did this through GovShop, our innovative supplier intelligence platform — where we mobilized the global community to enrich the R&D ecosystem for lifesaving supplies and equipment. PPE, ventilators, N95 masks, face shields, and more that hundreds of thousands of lives depended on in the face of this novel coronavirus.
With over 1.8 million companies and more than 180 million data points, GovShop created the largest supply chain data set, helping governments rapidly identify and engage a global ecosystem of companies and experts — companies providing solutions that weren’t even on the radar and hadn’t been considered — to deliver solutions and COVID 19 supplies that America desperately needed.
And the stakes couldn’t be higher. During a time when the demand for PPE was exceeding the supply, GovShop identified new and emerging businesses to enrich the ecosystem — increasing the supply base and vetting suppliers thoroughly under the guidance of the FBI — to weed out any bad actors.
GovShop has been working with the U.S. Army, the Air force, and the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management as well as the National Governors’ Association and local governments from coast to coast — from the state of North Carolina and New York to San Diego County. GovShop is also part of the COVID-19 Joint Acquisition Task Force to support the acquisition execution of the DoD’s COVID-19 response. This task force recognized GovShop’s value as an ecosystem and engaged us to conduct an expansive exercise to identify sources of supply for PPE.
And we did it all together — joining arms with our partners and broadening our community of suppliers, expanding our ecosystem’s reach, and supercharging it with our deep technical expertise. GovShop’s prowess and proficiency in high tech solutions drove innovation to the next level altogether by developing customized machine learning algorithms that drastically cut down on the time it takes to find and connect to the right supplier. 4 minutes — that’s all it took — 4 minutes for a Joint Acquisition Task Force member from the Air Force to find face shields for their heroes on the front lines of the pandemic.
We empowered companies like Clear Vu Medical — a company that traditionally manufactured plastic injection molds — as they pivoted swiftly to making face shields and got them connected to life-saving opportunities. Using GovShop, Clear Vu received an order from the State of North Carolina for 200,000 face shields. By the end of July, they’d provided 6 million face shields for doctors, nurses, and first responders. Here’s what their CEO Danny Lax said — “the sale we got through GovShop was a significant amount of revenue for us through a channel that didn’t exist — without GovShop, we wouldn’t have found that opportunity and capitalized on it.”
And when New York State requested a 3D printed component that could retrofit a BiPAP machine into an emergency ventilator to save lives, GovShop got to work — expediting the market research on the technicality of these machines and sourcing where and how to procure them. Using GovShop, we had a list of 37 companies that do additive manufacturing for the healthcare sector — a manageable list when the clock was ticking fast. Without GovShop, this would have taken 2 to 3 times longer – time that America simply did not have on our hands.
That’s what enriching the R&D ecosystem is about — that’s what makes GovShop the leader, paving the way for incredible companies to enter the government market — breaking down th21e barriers that stand in the way of innovative suppliers of all sizes and across markets to do business in the public sector — making it easier, quicker and more cost-effective for entrepreneurs to make an impact. To help those on the front lines. To save lives.
