Week 12 operational status – FULLY OPERATIONAL
Both Omega Plastics and Signal Plastics continue to be FULLY OPERATIONAL across all or our tooling, moulding and assembly services. We currently have 3% absence due to colleagues isolating in accordance with UK government guidance, but with no confirmed cases of COVID-19. We are managing this absence as we would normally and there is currently no impact to our production capacity.
We ordinarily operate 2 shifts across 5 days on tooling services at Omega Plastics and 24/5 on moulding and assembly across both Omega Plastics and Signal Plastics. We have discussed with our colleagues that if absence levels significantly increase and/or customer demand requires us to do so in a particular area of our business that we will add an additional shift or an additional working day to ensure we can continue to meet demand.
We are seeing varying demand levels from different sectors across our businesses. During this week we have started to see a significant fall in demand from automotive, where some larger UK car manufacturers or Tier 1 aggregators have temporarily ceased production. However, we are also seeing an increased demand for tooling and moulding from the medical, technical products and consumer goods sectors. We are working with customers in those sectors to help them accelerate new tooling projects or help them build or manage their stock position or meet their increased demand to end customers.
We are balancing and reallocating our resources against these evolving and fluid changes in demand and absence. We remain committed to doing everything as safely as possible to maintain operational continuity. We also want to take a medium-term view towards supporting our colleagues and maintaining our talented and committed team.
Our number one priority continues to be the safety of our colleagues and the communities in which we operate. Where anyone in our group can carry out their role from home, they are now doing so to reduce non-essential travel or contact. This amounts to about 20% of our team and includes our Commercial, Projects, Tooling Design, Finance/HR and elements of our Executive teams. As an engineering and manufacturing group, the remainder of our colleagues remain on-site and we are taking sensible precautions to limit personal contact and maintain vigilant hygiene.
We have not experienced any impact on infrastructure or logistics and, to date. We are monitoring the position daily and have identified a few “amber” supply chain concerns. None of these concerns are currently impacting production and we are proactively managing these positions to seek to reduce or mitigate any supply chain risk.
Our Executive team are reviewing the position daily and we remain in discussion with our suppliers and customers as to how the current position is impacting them and any contingency planning, we can all put in place to reduce supply chain disruption.
If you have any additional queries, please do not hesitate to contact your OPG representative. Our contact details are on our website, you can find them by clicking here.
This is much broader than a challenge to business. We send our best wishes to all customers, suppliers and business partners and their families and friends – please stay safe and well.
Craig Swinhoe
Group Managing Director
