Alpha Solway: The firm gearing up to produce millions of pieces of PPE

Alpha Solway will produce millions of masks for NHS Scotland

It was the kind of announcement any company would dream of.

Alpha Solway recently landed a £53m deal to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to NHS Scotland.

The numbers involved - 232 million surgical masks, six million respirator masks and two million visors - are impressive in themselves.

Now the firm - with sites in Annan and Dumfries - is gearing up to almost quadruple its 70-strong workforce in order to help fulfil the contract.

It is a rapid expansion for a company formed by a merger of Alpha Safety and Solway Safety in the late 1990s.

Sherree Gracie, operations director, said they had been selling disposable respirator masks for a number of years as part of a wide range of PPE products.

However, in the past, they were mainly bought in from Asia.

'Massive disruption'

The new factory in Dumfries will produce the masks

All that has had to change.

"Where we have come to now with the coronavirus pandemic, the disruption to the supply chain has been massive," said Ms Gracie.

"There was a need obviously within the UK to be able to manufacture and supply the PPE products from local sources."

It has also seen a shift in customer base - away from their traditional industrial demand for a range of protective equipment in the oil and gas, construction and food sectors.

"With the coronavirus pandemic we have ended up basically supplying into the health services," she said.

"The need was such at the time that they were in need of the product fairly quickly."

'Major shift'

The deal with NHS Scotland will help to create 200 new jobs

It meant Alpha Solway had to transform rapidly as the pandemic struck.

"Certainly within a month there was a major shift in having to supply the health service and I guess a lot of private industrial companies had begun to close because of what was going on," she added.

"So we were able to focus a bit more on supplying into that health market."

Although they are a relatively small operation, based in Annan with a new factory in Dumfries, they are part of the Globus Group - a worldwide PPE supplier.

Ms Gracie said that would help them to cope with demand in what was a "very significant" deal for the local economy with the production site in Dumfries set up specifically for new products.

"You are having to do it much faster than you would normally do these things," she said.

"We have got support at group level to assist us with that.

"We are just basically recruiting people as quickly as we can and putting the structure in place that we need."

'Incredibly proud'

Hospitals across the country will use PPE supplied by Alpha Solway

And can it last longer term?

Ms Gracie said sales teams were already working to ensure that was the case - both in their traditional sectors and in the health service.

The company also hopes the move to "shop local" will continue in years to come as the coronavirus outbreak has shown how quickly the supply chain from further afield can be interrupted.

"I really do think that is important that we retain a big chunk of what we buy locally," said Ms Gracie.

As for the NHS deal, she said they were "incredibly proud" to have secured it.

"We did work hard with them at the beginning of the pandemic to supply them," she said.

"We initially started off doing medical visors and we were producing them and ramping up production at a pace that we have probably never done before.

"It is nice for us as a business to see the fruits of our labour."