During this COVID-19 health crisis, there has been a wave of emotions, thoughts, plans, and actions that many businesses have taken throughout the country. This month’s blog is all about what Focused on Machining (FOM) is doing to ensure our people are safe, customers are taken care of, the business is taken care of, and the overall manufacturing community is taken care of.

In early March when all of this kicked off, we posted good hygiene practices on our bulletin board for employees to read, but we quickly realized that wasn’t going to be enough. States started shutting down, social distancing measures went into place, and non-essential businesses were closing. This is when we got anxious and started really taking it seriously with employees.  It was clear that the success of the business through this time was going to be determined by the health of the employees and our ability to continue business operations.

Immediately, we had meetings with employees instructing them to practice social distancing at the shop, we provided disinfectant wipes to the staff, we wiped down the shop, cleaning high touch areas with Clorox spray multiple times per week. We suspended any outside traffic into the shop.

We started making some process changes in our shop like rearranging our shipping and receiving department for UPS and FedEx to drop packages inside a door and keep them from coming into the shop. We did everything we could to make sure our work area was clean, and to stress the importance to our staff to stay healthy, practice social distancing and to refrain from going out on non-essential tasks. We purchased rubber gloves and other sanitation supplies to have on hand. We went as far as making our own washable masks for the staff over a weekend to provide them with anything they could use to continue to be healthy.

We also reached out to customers to let them know we were here for them and we were going to stay open and keep their supply chains open. We made it clear that if any portion of their supply chain was impacted, we would do everything we could to help them through it. We had frequent calls with our customers to determine if our base was going to be impacted so we could plan on possible workflow disruptions in the shop.

There was a lot of information coming out from the government on multiple relief and stimulus packages available to small businesses. We did as much research as we possibly could on these matters. We attended webinars, we read documents, we made phone calls to banks and accountants to make sure we understood the tools that were there to help us through this time.

Lastly, we checked in with our local community to engage and see how everyone else was doing. We provided advice in areas where we knew more than other shop owners. We asked questions of those who knew more than we did. We provided support to local communities for healthcare supplies, we offered our manufacturing and 3D printing services to help with critical supplies. Much of this was facilitated by the Rocky Mountain Tooling & Machining Association (RMTMA) which is a local chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA). RMTMA was great about providing resources and webinars for shops to learn and lean on each other for advice and assistance.

We will continue to do all these things for as long as the pandemic lasts. Our goal is to always ensure our workforce has the tools and equipment they need to be healthy at the shop and at home. And we will continue to reach out to our community through RMTMA to learn from other shop owners, to teach where we can, and to be a contributing member to the Manufacturing community so we can all survive this and come out the other side stronger.

Justin Quinn, President