Horstman Covid-19 Status – Advisory to our Customers and Suppliers

Horstman advisory to customers and suppliers: 
Covid-19 as at 17Mar20

Our business continuity as your business partner is high priority, second only to our care for our colleagues' welfare and safety.

You will have seen much notices in recent weeks, so we will try to spare you repetition.

• We are prepared
• We have substantial financial reserves
• We have an experienced, flexible and adaptive workforce, with the calm and adaptable presence of many veterans
• Established in 1913, we have more than a century of heritage dealing with change, uncertainty, urgent wartime needs, epidemics, depressions, civil disturbance, and bad weather. We're still here. We intend to keep it that way.
• Our commitment to our partners, colleagues, customers and suppliers is that corporate brand is not going to fail this challenge, not if we can help it.
• We will improvise, adapt and overcome. We will support our employees and their families in difficult times to the best of our ability.
• We ask our suppliers to do their best to keep supply flowing, and to tell us if they run into difficulty so we can help if we can.
• We ask customers to keep communication lines open, notably in timings for collections and shipping arrangements.
• At this time, supply chain and operations are working normally, with the exception of some shipping, due to ISO container shortages in the Northern hemisphere. This will disrupt shipping times and airfreight capacity for, we assume, 6 months.

Ian Pain

CEO Horstman Group

Notes: As at 17Mar20

For those who really like details: our UK operations has completed full scale testing of remote working for all non-shop floor roles, analysed lessons learned and adapted to optimise our performance. We are commencing dispersed/remote working patterns as of 17 March for office based employees. Shop floor and logistics will continue to operate from out Bath site, with adjustments to reduce shift overlaps. All colleagues with underlying health conditions have been advised to isolate and work from home. At the same time we intend to maximise overtime patterns to maintain business momentum as long as we can.

Our US and Canadian operations are preparing to follow suit in the coming days as required. Our parent company RENK AG is taking similar measures in Germany. Horstman has substantial cash reserves, adequate for continued operation throughout 2020, even in these difficult times. All of our global workforce, including temporary and new employees, will receive pay wether working from home, sick or on vacation and we have amended local sickness/vacation rules to encourage self isolation if symptomatic or exposed to others who are. In the event that we have to close any manufacturing operations we will use the operator's time working from home to further invest in training and in process improvements.