Blog - How is celduc facing the significant challenges of the COVID-19 crisis ?
celduc® relais, like most of the French industry, has been directly impacted by the government’s decision to enter to a lockdown period starting from the 17th of March 2020. We were expecting such resolution after facts we saw in Italy a couple of days before, and we already had a continuity plan in minds, always with a fighting spirit.
Our orders portfolio has increased by 20% at the beginning of March, as many of our customers have anticipated the crisis. Then, booking dropped down by 50% in April for many reasons… More than 50% of our customers in Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, France and USA are in the same situation and have asked celduc® to postpone their deliveries.
Other customers, mainly in Germany, Japan, China and Korea continue to put a big pressure on us to be delivered faster, even by express shipments.
We can notice that “health care” and “medical” activities are exponentially rising in the aim to insure care in good conditions.
We were constraint to shutdown our production site from the 17th to the 20th of March. Meanwhile, we have organized all security measures allowing us to call back our employees at work. Thanks to celduc® distinctive agility, we have reopened our manufacturing plant on the 23rd of March in the morning. We were in perfect compliance with new public health restrictions (adapting workplaces with social distancing, providing sanitizing equipments, etc…).
Security measures and interaction restrictions, we’ve put in place from the 23rd of March, required us to decrease our production capability for the first two or three weeks : we can say that we took off with roughly 60% of our manufacturing capacities. All of us were motivated to meet this challenge and prove again that our team is still atypical.
On the other hands, many of our subcontractors and distributors have faced the same situation and stopped their activity for several days, which led to many raw material delivery issues in our supply chain.
For these reasons, we put a first priority on our top strategic customers and urgent demands related to fight against COVID-19 (SSRs needed to control medical masks production machines, autoclaves, hydro alcoholic gel bottle fillers, etc…).
We have now improved our production and reached a capability above 80%. We are working hard to catch up all the late orders and we are planning to maybe open a second shift within the middle of May. Our expectation will be to fill entirely our delays by end of June, which means we have a very hardworking two complete months. Meanwhile, and despite of being quite more agile than our competitors, we will continue to have lots of delayed deliveries for a while and we count on our customers to understand this exceptional situation.
Our daily challenge is to adjust our human resources and production planning in the aim to fully satisfy our partner’s demand…. This will always be our moto. I know that each colleague involved in the supply chain of celduc® is 100% committed to do his best, working hard in a very difficult situation. We feel a need to operate in the most effective way because we love celduc® relais.
In fact, time to get lessons from this pandemic hasn’t come yet, but I am convinced that the whole industry will adapt itself as for the similar past situations in the history.
We will continue to focus on the security and the health protection of our colleagues and we will pay lots of attention to our savings. We approve only the innovative and the vital investments. Other projects are postponed till we see better the coming economical worldwide model.
In the meantime, we will work all together inside celduc® relais, operators, masters and the management board, to integrate the impact of this situation even inside our daily routine and in the long term strategies.
Finally, we will continue to improve our reactiveness and agility, both are main keys for the success of our company…
Thank you!
Phone : 312-420-0519
434 E. Main Street, #429
Centerport NY 11721
USA
