Page 60 - BusinessWest August 17, 2020
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 Manufacturers
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Carlson sounded
Round Numbers
For Simonds and his team, the state-ordered shut- down came, as noted earlier, during the busiest time of the year for the facility, which has enjoyed a resur- gence over the past few years as Callaway has made huge strides in gaining market share within the golf- ball industry.
And turning everything off is, as he said, a some- what complicated undertaking.
“For any machines that have materials in them, they have to be purged properly,” he explained. “We need to take all the raw materials that are sensitive
to environmental conditions and put them in envi- ronmentally controlled areas. We need to take care of WIP — work in process — and try to process as much as possible so we don’t have time-sensitive WIP sit- ting on the production floor.
“It’s a matter of systematically shutting down operations so we don’t have inventory sitting in the wrong places,” he went on, adding that the process was made more complicated by the fact that no one really knew for how long the plant would be dark.
Meanwhile, on the personnel side, most all employees were furloughed — and nearly all of them came back, he went on, adding that the operation slowly wound back up, but since then, activity has sped up dramatically, with many of those employees securing large amounts of overtime.
“We’ve gone from zero to 100 as quickly as we could. Once the golf courses started opening up, the demand for product was almost unprecedented — there was so much golf being played,” Simonds said, adding that courses in most all states were open sev- eral weeks before the plant was reopened — if they had closed at all. “And the golf business has remained pretty strong; we’re chasing demand.”
The same is true at Peerless and Sanderson MacLeod, where, in addition to meeting orders, the plants are coping with new ways of communicating, meeting as teams, and planning, as much as possible, for what might come next.
And also learning and growing from the shared experience of not only coping with a pandemic and all the challenges it has brought, but in some cases thriving.
Indeed, Carlson said the past several months have brought a close workforce even closer together as they contend with the protocols, the surge in busi- ness, and a shared desire to be prepared for the worst-case scenario while hoping for something much better.
Borsari agreed, and said some of the real ‘oppor- tunities,’ a word he’s hesitant to use in this climate, come in the broad area of relationship build-
ing when it comes to both clients and the team at Sanderson-MacLeod.
“It’s been a unique opportunity to connect with our client base in a way we haven’t done before,” he told BusinessWest. “It’s all about collaboratively figur- ing out the best way to keep both companies open; we’re really had a lot of good relationships become even better because we realize how dependent we are on one another.
“And as an organization, finding our way through this together has made us stronger,” he went on. “We’ve done everything we can as a company to make this a place of normalcy. Everything else around them was going crazy, and one of the key points we made in March was to do everything we can to follow the mandates and make sure our people are safe, but we also want to make sure to maintain normalcy as much as we can.”
Up Off the Floor
Looking ahead, Carlson said her company has taken what steps it can to be prepared for what might come next.
Yes, that means stocking up on toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other pandemic-related needs that were in such short supply when the first wave hit six months ago.
“I’m ready for us to keep moving the way we’re moving,” she explained. “Even if we did walk back any of the phases of the reopening or went back into a shutdown, we’d still be open and still going at the pace we’re going, and perhaps be even busier; we’re prepared.”
But, as Borsari noted, even for manufacturers in the coveted ‘essential’ category, there is too much uncertainty to ever be comfortable, or fully prepared.
“Nothing is stable,” he said. “Just because we’re essential doesn’t mean anything’s safe or easy; so much is dependent on the attitude of the state, or the people who decide to come to work or not come into work, tariff measures, travel bans ... all of these could have an impact.”
Such is life in a sector that, like most others, has seen COVID-19 change almost everything and create conditions that are anything but business as usual. u
George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]
Precautions also extend to service in individual homes and businesses
— crews will go in only after ensuring there are no COVID-related issues at the address in question — and to the control centers, which are vital to man- aging the electric system.
“Day to day, we have a sufficient number of people to manage these facilities, but one of the fears from the pandemic is that if someone got sick and they passed it to fellow employees, that might quickly impact our people and make it so we couldn’t operate that system,” Hallstrom explained. “Those people are highly trained, and in the case of transmission, they’re certified, so that was a big concern.”
Utilities
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similar tones, noting that, in many respects, the pan- demic hasn’t impacted the overall bottom line; in fact, it has helped generate more business with some clients.
It didn’t look that way back in the spring, when the state’s shutdown, which most thought would last a few weeks, instead stretched to nearly two months. “At that point,” she said, “I was pretty confident that 2020 was going to be a bust.”
Instead, it’s shaping up to be better than last year — which was quite solid.
“We’re not just steady, we’re busy, and we’re get- ting busier,” she told BusinessWest, adding that the company had a record July, usually one of its slower months. “A lot of that’s on the defense, not aerospace, side, but also our defense aerospace has picked up a lot as well.”
But in addition to creating more work, the pan- demic has also changed how work is carried out, creating a number of challenges for those managing plants, especially early on in the pandemic, when there was little guidance on how to keep workers safe — and also little hand sanitizer to be found.
“We had to get people to understand that they can’t stand shoulder to shoulder with one another — you have to maintain that six feet,” Carlson said. “I had put limits on the number of people who could be in rooms with closed doors; we’d take turns disinfect- ing the entire shop. In the morning, one guy does the shop floor, at lunchtime, another one does it, and at the end of the day, they do it again.”
Simonds agreed, and noted that, by strictly enforcing the rules and following the protocols, the plant has seen no cases, and no interruptions, since reopening.
“We’re sticking to the CDC protocols, and it’s worked for us,” he said. “Everyone is temperature- screened; everyone wears a mask at all times; we’re restricting meeting rooms based on square footage and number of people in the rooms; no employee gatherings beyond the number cited by the state; anyone who goes on vacation and travels outside of Massachusetts to a restricted area has to follow pro- tocols coming back in.
“One of the challenges was just getting used to things,” he went on. “Wearing a mask, especially in the summertime, is difficult, but people have been great, and we’re all used to it now; it’s just a matter of practice.”
  Utilities
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er events like Isaias has been beneficial as it continually adjusts to life during the pandemic.
“We’ve had quite a bit of experience working through numerous storms and large-scale electric outages in the past, and have conducted various emer- gency-response drills over the years,” he explained. “So we were somewhat prepared to take action — although the duration of this pandemic is something we’ve never experienced before.”
Elaborating, he recalled that, as it became clear the pandemic was com- ing and there would be a significant impact, the Westfield G&E implement- ed an emergency-management plan, designated a COVID-compliance offi- cer, and formed an incident-response
team of key management personnel — a team that continues to meet regularly to discuss what’s happening and what is likely to happen in the weeks and months to come, although looking far down the road is extremely difficult.
“During this pandemic, we’re always concerned about the health and safety of our employees, our customers, and the general public,” Contrino told Busi- nessWest. “Although we have essential services to provide, we want to keep everyone safe; we have that balancing act going on — while we’re trying to provide our services, we’re also going to keep everyone healthy.”
Hallstrom concurred, also using the phrase ‘balancing act’ to describe how Eversource is working to keep the power flowing while keeping employ- ees and customers safe.
He said roughly half the utility’s 8,000 employees‚ including those in finance, HR, accounting, and other business functions, have been working at home the past 20 weeks or so. Most of ‘his’ 2,800 employees, those who work to directly provide power and maintain service, have been coming to the office — in whatever shape it takes — every day.
Keeping these individuals safe has become a top priority.
“We’ve implanted many safety pro- tocols — we promote face masks and washing hands, and instead of crews going out two per truck, we’ve had them going out one per truck,” he explained. “We’ve actually bought trucks and taken vehicles out of retirement to increase our fleet so that people can go out by themselves in a vehicle.”
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