Covid -19 and its continued impact.
How is the Covid-19 affecting your company?
We service multiple sectors of the baking industry from small craft bakeries and food service operations, to large industrial bakeries. The crisis affected those segments differently and, as such, our business with those sectors. In addition, we had to quickly respond to the Covid-19 outbreak to ensure the safety of our employees, while continuing our critical service to the European and global food supply chain. With operations in multiple countries it was important to make sure we addressed the needs and regulations of each location. We created a team with members from our locations in the UK, Spain and Romania to keep everyone up to date on current situations and safety protocols. This exercise has actually strengthened all of our cross-company communications.
What have the impacts been on supplies and installations?
We are fortunate to have well-established European supply chains and hold quite a bit of stock material to weather such challenges. This strategy has allowed us to keep all our facilities running continuously and servicing our customers throughout the crisis. We are also in the unique position of having multiple coating and manufacturing sites across Europe and around the world that can be utilized in the event one site is compromised.
How is Covid-19 affecting service?
We have worked tirelessly to ensure seamless support to our customers. If anything, our lead times have decreased due to the impact on the food service business. This has allowed us to flex capacity to support our other bread and roll customers who have been strained to keep up with demand.
We have also conducted numerous virtual calls, using platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and High Five. This has provided us with the capability to stay connected to our customers and minimize the impact of travel restrictions.
How are you reassuring your clients?
We are trying to strike the right balance of communication with our customers so that they know we are still here to support them, but without over burdening them while they deal with their own operational challenges brought on by the crisis. Ultimately, our continued service is the best reassurance we can provide to our great customers.
Have you announced short term working?
We have been able to keep the vast majority of our teams fully engaged by tele-working where possible, and staggered shifts elsewhere to reduce the risk of spread to our teams. We have also reassigned team members to move forward process improvement plans and other investments so that we will be even more efficient and effective when this crisis passes.
William Bundy – President, Global Manufacturing
What are your short-term plans after Covid-19?
We are looking forward to getting back out to see our customers and thank them for continuing to support our communities with critical food staples. We know that they have been overwhelmed by recent events and demands, and we will be engaging with them to see how we can partner with them to emerge from this pandemic even stronger.
How is the Covid -19 affecting your company?
We set up crisis management protocols right from the start, which enabled us to adapt our way of working in just a few days. Our information systems have proved to be particularly efficient, enabling the 100 people in the design office to work from home without loss of productivity.
Our supply chain was only affected for 2 weeks and I would like to thank our sub-contractors from the bottom of my heart for having chosen Mecatherm to avoid any supply shortage.
Nevertheless, COVID-19 was a major “stress test” that called upon all our staff individually, professionally and managerially. We were able to test the company’s very resilience on this occasion. I am very proud of the work and commitment of each and every one of our employees.
We entered the crisis with 3 objectives: to guarantee the safety of our staff; guarantee continuity of service to our customers; and guarantee Mecatherm’s financial solidity at the end of the crisis. We are pleased to see that these objectives have been achieved.
How is Covid-19 affecting service?
The imposed geographic travel limitation were offset by: a hotline offered to all our customers during the crisis; the availability of programmers to connect to all our installations, and the mobilization when necessary of local supply chains with our customers to produce parts in an emergency (either in machining, sheet metal work or 3D-printing).
This is the most flexible and responsive service model we had in place before the crisis and has proven perfectly effective.
How are you reassuring your clients during?
We have implemented exceptional protocols internally and pro-active communications with all our customers in operations, one-to-one and regularly, in order to be as close as possible to their needs and to remain in privacy of their industrial activity.
We have received from them a lot of recognition for this pro-active approach.
During the crisis, we had the pleasure of continuing to take significant industrial orders, and of course of being able to reassure our customers about our financial solidity, including providing of substantial bank guarantees.
Have you announced short term working?
One of our aims was to maintain all our teams. This objective has been reached and we are not considering any measures to reduce the workforce.
What are you short term plans after Covid-19?
We expect investment activity to generally slow down overall in the coming year.
We remain at our customer’s disposal for more minor maintenance operations or upgrades of their existing lines and equipment for purposes of flexibility or industrial performance.
Our business model is such that we can easily cope with very significant activity increases or decreases.
Olivier Sergent, President and CEO of the Mecatherm Group
