What measures have you had to implement to ensure production is not affected?

We have rolled these measures out across all our production units in Europe.

  • We have divided into three teams – office arriving with a 15 minute gap- production 1 hour.
  • SLT on different teams
  • Our canteen is closed except for single use for teas/coffees and we are asking people to lunch in their cars.
  • Complete separation of office and production staff
  • Compulsory temperature testing each day on arrival and before entry – no queue allowed.
  • Continuous use of hand sanitisers
  • Everyone brings their own cutlery mugs etc.
  • All office/admin staff/sales staff, where possible, are working  remotely
  • Al non-essential meetings are cancelled
  • We are aiming to keep  5 days’ work in the system in the event that we have to shift work to a sister site  -working weekends and St Patrick’s Day.
  • We have uploaded everything onto to our shared MIS systems which can be remotely assessed by one of our sister plants in the event of a single plant shutdown.
  • We have emphasised to staff that it must be only work/home/home/work, which they seem to welcome as they are all very frightened.

Have you seen an increase in orders from suppliers/supermarkets rushing to replace the products whipped of the shelves in panic buys.

We are working to full capacity,  customers are increasing their usual orders – the paper producers are struggling to fulfil orders. Lead times have increased from 24 hrs turnaround to 5 days which is an issue.

Have you received much in the way of advice, outside of the general public information given out by the government, about how to keep business going?

Yes good support from Enterprise Ireland and plenty of good information on Government websites.