Message from: SLAC
Date: 06 April 2020
SLAC Group have released a statement from chief operating officer, international and chief marketing officer, Chris McKenzie. Chris, based in Australia, has been in global lockdown and has endorsed the use of modern technology to remain socially interactive without face to face meetings.
“We have reported many times that SLAC have been working on The Hive Initiative,” he said. “That is to say we have been helping the industry to move towards using Artificial Intelligence to make what we do in the future when we can’t get personnel in the plants less of a burden – we are moving this up now because unfortunately the future is here, we are adding new tools to monitor and support our customers daily to enact this.
“We in our facility in the resort city of Suzhou, have all returned to work now for some time, we are at 100% manufacturing capacity with some orders delayed slightly through issues outside of our control.
“The extended Chinese New Year vacation enacted by the Government, which was effective, obviously caused us some backlogs but we have added extra shifts to make sure we catch up on lost time. We utilise some US and EU suppliers and have seen issues with some of their deliveries, we continue to work through the supply chain to do our best to make decisions that mitigate this.
“Delivery issues at our customers’ location may be in the next few months problematic as borders close, here in Australia we have closed borders and spatial distancing but the flow of cargo, we hope that this model remains globally, people still need cans for food and beverage.
“Having gone through these tribulations in the first quarter of the year we to this date have on our books a backlog that equates to over 70% of last year’s total sales, healthy strong and ready for the next three quarters with high expectancies for another year of growth even through adversity.
“We at SLAC want to reassure you that because of the decisions made in January 2020 in China we are in the enviable position that we can ensure any requests made today will be dealt with quickly and efficiently, orders made today for all SLAC Equipment will be delivered on time. Even in the present crisis in Europe our Engineers have still been embedded in customer locations throughout Europe.
“Finally, because we have been lucky to have come through this pandemic and understand the fear that the virus can cause we have reached out to our customers globally and offered and in many cases supplied medical masks, gloves and in some cases hand sanitizer, the last one in many cases unfortunately cannot be shipped to many locations as it has alcohol content which can be classed as flammable.”