MAY 20228MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSIN MY OPINIONWHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES THAT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS PRESENTED FOR MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY? PLEASE ELABORATEStanley Black & Decker has been focused on delivering against three key priorities throughout the pandemic: ensuring the safety and health of our employees, continuing to serve our customers and maintaining our financial strength, and doing our part to help communities and governments mitigate the effects of the virus. These priorities align with the challenges that many manufacturing companies have faced over the past 12 months.The most important of these challenges was protecting employees and keeping them safe as well as their customers, families, and communities. At Stanley Black & Decker, we took immediate action even before the pandemic was in full force. In January 2020, we anticipated that demand for PPE would increase significantly in the weeks and months to come. The safety of our employees is our top priority, and we deemed it essential to ensure that we had an adequate supply of PPE to protect our manufacturing workforce. In mid-January, we made the decision to pre-emptively buy 100,000 face masks from a local supplier in China to bolster our existing supply. This additional supply helped us when PPE became virtually impossible to acquire. It also enabled us to provide masks to employees for their families to help mitigate community spread which turned out to be a greater risk.Second, in late January, we encouraged all our employees to return early from their Chinese New Year travels. We were expecting the government to announce nationwide lockdowns before the end of the holiday, and once the lockdown was official, employees who weren't already back in the region before the lockdown would not be able to come to work for many weeks or even months. Around 1,000 employees returned early, which allowed us to quickly restart our operations in early February, once the government gave us permission to do so.In the following months, we took similar action in locations around the world, which provided highly effective in protecting our employees. In fact, our safety measures meet and often significantly exceed those required. They include temperature screenings, social distancing measures, continuous cleaning and sanitation, virtual work for employees who are able to do so, and more. These measures helped us navigate a second challenge: maintaining business continuity. Nearly 600 of our vendors and suppliers were also impacted by the pandemic, revealing single-source dependencies across our supply chain.THE PANDEMIC CAUSED A PERFECT STORM OF DISRUPTION TO SUPPLY FIRST, THEN TO DEMAND, AND FINALLY TO WORKING PRACTICES STARTING IN CHINA AND SPREADING ACROSS THE GLOBE. HOW WILL THIS PROPEL CHANGES IN THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY?The pandemic has led to the acceleration of two trends: supply chain flexibility and adopting best-in-class Industry 4.0 solutions. Technologies such as IOT, artificial intelligence and machine learning allow us to apply predictive analytics to more effectively track supply and demand coupled with flexible manufacturing such as mobile robots and cooperative robotics to improve productivity and agility in plants and distribution centers.Stanley Black & Decker has always been focused on a "make where we sell" strategy, meaning manufacture and sell products in the same market, sourcing materials and components as close to the manufacturing location as possible. During the pandemic, we re-visited our supply chain strategy to reduce reliance on single vendors and to build a more resilient supply chain. This strategy is helping THE PANDEMIC AND THE MANUF ACTURING INDUSTRY By Mark Maybury, Chief Technology Officer, Stanley Black & DeckerMark Maybury
< Page 7 | Page 9 >