Company Update April 9, 2020
For this week’s update, I will focus on the scope of incremental safety enhancements we are developing for the Bridgewater facilities in the face of CoV-19 virus realities. During this pandemic shutdown, all employees should begin adjusting their expectations to a ‘new normal’ for how we will behave and move around one another at work.
There is a tremendous amount of energy across the entire automotive industry being devoted to making our manufacturing environments as safe as possible for our companies to return to work in the coming weeks. OEMs and suppliers are working individually and collectively to develop, and in some cases, run trials for, new best practices. We are also benefitting from benchmarking against overseas industry standards, especially from East Asia, where workplace mitigation against virus spread has been more robust. Trade and business associations, chambers of commerce, and economic development agencies are assisting and coordinating some of these efforts. Overall, there is an increasing recognition that new industry-wide standards will need to be implemented.
I emphasize that our efforts in this area are a work-in-progress, but want to give you a flavor of some of the changes we are considering:
- Staggered arrival times for sub-groups of a shift
- Multiple, designated plant entry points for sub-groups
- Daily thermal scanning for fever
- Daily affirmation by every employee on certain risk factors
- Adding face coverings, and possibly shields, to mandatory PPE
- Restricted travel within the plants
- Physical barriers between the closest work stations
- Adjustments to rotations and break times
- Work station sanitization upon each rotation
- Changes to seating arrangements in cafeterias
Any changes will be additional to the increased cleaning and sanitization measures we had already undertaken prior to the shutdown. Again, processes will differ slightly among the different plants, and your plant management team will communicate specifics as they are finalized.
A few OEM plants are running in a very limited capacity in the United States right now (akin to what we were doing with RECARO in Detroit until last week), and are emphasizing to us these kinds of safety changes involve trial-and-error. A successful restart at Bridgewater will require flexible engagement by all our employees, and a team approach. When you return, be patient with one another and the managers, and give each other the benefit of doubt. I firmly believe such an approach by everyone will get us operating smoothly much more quickly, and with a lot less frustration.
A few other updates as I conclude:
All our customers have now pushed their projected restart dates into May, and so there will be no production this month.
We are continuing to track several employees who are ill, but that number has decreased considerably since last week. Also, I am pleased to report the number of hospitalized employees is down, as several of them have been discharged to finish recuperating at their homes. Finally, and thankfully, there have been no additional fatalities.
Much is being made in national media about General Motors and Ford Motor Company mass producing medical ventilators for the national stockpile, which is wonderful, but I also want to lift up the great work Adient is doing to produce Level 1 medical facemasks for health care workers. Adient is also exploring producing hospital bed mattresses to support emergency hospital expansions during the crisis. Good stuff.
At next week’s update I will focus on the financial impacts of the pandemic shutdown on our firm, and on Adient and the auto industry more broadly. For now, the company continues to implement measures to reduce costs and conserve cash in order to position us for future success as production resumes and the economy recovers.
Everyone be well.
Ron
Ronald E. Hall
President & CEO