NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - While helicopter-dropped food packages dominate the headlines, another army of workers are scrambling behind the scenes to make the water filtration systems, logistics arrangements and other specialized equipment needed for the disaster response effort.

Although many of the supplies currently arriving in Southeast Asia came from preexisting stockpiles, aid agencies say most of their reserves are now depleted and additional supplies will need to be ordered.

And while some items -- like food and water -- are generally bought locally, things such as water sanitation supplies and custom vehicles often originate in companies far away.

One such item is a powder from Proctor & Gamble Co. (Research) that purifies water.

"The scale at which we have been sending it now is unprecedented," said Greg Allgood, director of Proctor & Gamble's safe drinking water program. "I haven't slept in days."

Allgood said the factory in Karachi, Pakistan where the powder is made is already running at increased capacity and may soon go to three shifts. And if problems arise at the Karachi facility, which is brand new, he said the company is willing to fly workers in from the old plant in the Philippines to make sure production doesn't stop.

"We're staffing up," he said, "We're going to do whatever it takes to get our production up."

Allgood said the powder is distributed in ketchup packet-sized pouches, with each pouch treating up to 10 liters of water. He said the pouches cost between 7 and 8 cents to produce but that Proctor & Gamble sells them to agencies like Samaritan's Purse and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent for 3 and a half cents each.

In the few years since the powder was developed, Allgood said the company had dispensed 13 million pouches in places like Haiti and Bam, Iran. But that was before the tsunamis. He said 16 million pouches have been shipped in the last week alone. "And I'm confident that number will rise," he said.

At the other end of the cost-per-unit spectrum is Toyota Gibraltar, which is the main supplier of vehicles designed for the developing world to the United Nations and most aid organizations.

"We have straight-away seen an increase in demand," said Toyota Gibraltar's marketing manager Michael McElwee. "And we only just started to see the tip of a very large iceberg."

McElwee said it is hard to compare recent demand with previous months because the company almost immediately sold out of the 70 right hand-side drive vehicles it had in stock.

But he said his staff will be busy well into the night, if not all night, fitting VHF radios on 30 Land Cruisers ordered by the UN's World Food Program. He said the vehicles have to be ready in 24 to 48 hours for an expected airlift via military cargo plane to southeast Asia.

"It's quite a job to get everything into place," he said. "We're pretty much wiped out."

Even logistics companies are feeling the pressure.

According to Ludo Oelrich, a spokesman for the Dutch shipping company TNT, the company had to reposition large numbers of its Asia staff and scramble to find subcontractors, mainly to help with in-kind partnerships the company has with the World Food Program.

Oelrich said the company doubled its ground shipping capacity in Thailand in one day.