Wednesday, April 8 Update

Wednesday, April 8 Update

We now have the first  confirmed case of Coronavirus in Mason County, and I understand that this person is recovering at their home.

Toyota was the last of the major OEM’s to announce extending their downtime until the beginning of May.  Of all our customers, only Tesla in Shanghai and Reno are still operating.  Today Stan Krupinski, John Boos and Bob Parks safely shipped some inventory to Tesla from Madison and Progress.  Thank you guys for coming in to take care of Tesla.

Many of our customers are delaying their payments to us, putting us in a precarious situation.  This will make it difficult to pay our suppliers on time.  Even though most people are on layoff, we have fixed costs like health insurance and utilities that do not go away and we have little money coming in to pay for these things.  Therefore we are limiting expenses to the bare minimum and trying to re-negotiate payment terms to get us through this lean time.  This will probably be the case for the next few months.

Steve Gray, Dan Kittleson and the plant managers are working on new safety procedures that will be put in place so that we can return to work when we need to.  We are also purchasing supplies that will be needed for these new procedures like gloves, masks, touchless sanitizer dispensers, cleaning supplies and those kind of things.

We still don’t know exactly when and how we will start back up, but let me tell you how things are looking.  If most of our customers are starting up in during the first week of May, we will need to start up a week earlier (April 27) for those parts that are low in inventory.  It will not be a full crew.  A week before that (April 20) we will be bringing in a number of maintenance, electrical people, technicians and engineers to get things ready for a safe startup.  Again, not everyone will be needed.  We will communicate our plans to our city and county governments so there are no issues.

When we do recall, it will be volunteers first.  We also will be taking into consideration situations that make it impossible to return, such as illness and childcare challenges.  Only after exhausting volunteers will we be formally recalling people according to our handbook.  Again, the policy will have to be modified to allow for people who cannot return due to illness or childcare problems.

That’s enough for today.

David