As the global impact of COVID-19 continues to evolve on an hourly basis, the team here at Extel continues to review and prioritize our action plans.
Our leadership team is in daily discussions monitoring and reviewing our business continuity plans. Importantly, it is then about action.
Our priority is the health and safety of our teams whilst minimizing disruption to our clients and business partners. We have taken a proactive position, in line with the Government recommendations, to reduce the risk of infection which include the following:
- Increased communication within our teams to ensure there is awareness around all changing conditions and protocols.
- Increased protocols on cleaning and sanitizing our internal environment
- A split of shifts/working groups allows for business continuity should one group be infected.
- Remote working – we have a minimum of 50% of our administration and corporate support services working from home. This is on a rotational basis.
- Internal face-to-face meetings scaled back, with all small meeting rooms closed.
- Social distancing, including the reconfiguration of our working spaces.
- We have restricted all access to our building with the Extel team being the only people permitted to enter the premises.
- All domestic and international travel has been halted.
- All face-to-face meetings outside of Extel premises have been suspended. We have a number of video conferencing platforms that are allowing us to meet.
- As Extel provides the complete end to end service of design through to manufacturing and servicing, the key business risk is in our manufacturing area. Our 2-shift structure provides a natural risk mitigation approach. This combined with the increased measures above is ensuring business continuity.
Supply chain and exchange rates are two key areas that we are closely monitoring. With our supply chain, we have not encountered any severe impact across the board related to lead-times and any delays to date have been communicated and worked through on a case-by-case basis with our clients. This is however very fluid and changing daily, and so we encourage all of our clients to help us mitigate any adverse effect on the supply chain by forward ordering up to 4 weeks to effectively build in some additional lead-time.
Our team is busy expediting on a daily basis to ensure we are informed so that we can keep our clients up to date, but recommend forward ordering as stated above. As the majority of our purchases for components are in US$ we are working with all partners to ensure any impacts are well communicated.
The Extel team remains confident in our ability to deliver our ongoing services to our partners. Please reach out to our team if you require any further information by simply clicking here.
We thank our team and our partners for their understanding and flexibility during these challenging times.
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Fitzgerald
Chief Executive Officer