Corona: Protection and Prevention Measures

November 20, 2020

Dear valued customer,
 

The Corona virus pandemic is still affecting all of us. No sooner has the first wave been completed than we have to face a second viral attack even more aggressive than the first one.
After learning from the first wave, we came out stronger and were once again able to put in place all the necessary measures to protect our employees and ensure the continuity of our business, at all of our manufacturing, R&D, sales and support sites in order to fulfil our delivery commitments to you, our customers.

As of today we have avoided any notable impact of Corona on our deliveries. Our supply chains are constantly being monitored and have proven to be robust, and despite isolated infection incidents we managed to maintain our production capacity.

We have achieved this by the following measures

1. We implemented a central Corona Crisis Team that communicates by an intranet web page which is accessible to all our employees. It lists all rules / recommendations from local public health authorities as well as all PI specific regulations. It is closely monitored these rules are also followed.
    
2. Travel activities / Visits / Trade Shows
   All international travel activities were banned at PI. This rule is still in place to face this second wave. As of today all domestic travel activities are limited to vital cases, each one needs to be signed off by C-Level Management. The same rules hold true in regard to visits to PI.
   Trips to and visits from high risk areas as defined by the Robert Koch Institute are not allowed at all.
    
3. Internal Organization Rules
   PI has already reduced its workforce presence on site, employees are working from home office wherever possible.
   For people working on site in person
   - meetings have been replaced by virtual ones wherever possible,
   - arrangements have been made to allow a safety distance of 2m to be observed in all offices and production floors
   - production teams and purchasing / engineering teams are working in separated shifts that do not overlap
    
4. Supply Chain
   In our supply chain we follow an approach, where we started to source parts earlier than needed to gain additional time to compensate any issues occurring at our sub suppliers. We have already created supply chain centers in main markets and use a worldwide supplier base wherever possible to make our supply chains robust. In addition we are constantly polling our main suppliers to assess any potential risks.

The situation we are facing today is unprecedented in our lifetime and a challenge in many aspects. We are confident, however, that the measures as described above significantly reduce the risks to health of our employees and will allow us to keep up production.
As we are providing guidelines and rules to our employees and supply chain we are permanently working on adapting them to the dynamically evolving situation.

Take care and stay healthy!

Best regards
Physik Instrumente GmbH & Co. KG