Five Ways the Pandemic Reshaped Manufacturing

As the United States and the world experienced unprecedented challenges because of the pandemic, the link to the following article outlines five ways the pandemic reshaped U.S. manufacturing.

“Five Ways the Pandemic Reshaped U.S. Manufacturing” on IndustryNet.com >

 

For Reliant Systems, Inc. and Dynamic Precision Manufacturing, the pandemic forced us and our industry to reflect on how we operate and develop innovative solutions for collaboration with our customers and vendors.  The following are five ways that we adapted to this event and continue to adapt to remain responsive to those we have the privilege to serve as customers.

Stronger, More Local Supply Chains

Just as we see trends in the food market and restaurant business of localizing food sourcing such as “farm to table” concepts, we also examined how we could expand our sourcing partners to provide more flexibility in resource acquisition with sources that are closer to our location or explore how we could produce parts and materials needed ourselves.  This has led to new opportunities for us that we look forward to enacting or exploring further to increase our ability to maintain supply chains.

How Manufacturing Learned to Adapt

Like many other companies, we increased our ability to be adaptive to our environment and conditions during this time.  Innovation required us to examine our current processes and procedures to be able to not only make sure that we were providing a healthy and secure environment for our team to work in, but also allowed us to examine how we could help our vendors, suppliers, and customers maintain their healthy environments so that workflows could continue with minimal disruption.

The “Essential” Question

As we are designated as an “essential business” in the critical manufacturing sector, we have maintained business operations throughout the pandemic.  Our partner network of suppliers, vendors, and processors were also allowed to maintain business operations as we worked together to provide high quality parts and assemblies for our customers.  We appreciated the commitment of our network to maintain their operations at the high level of service that we in turn strive to provide.

Lead Time Troubles

As the article outlined, changes in demand in one industry sector could have a major impact on another and in the case of chip manufacturing, we will see an impact of this for some time to come.

For Reliant Systems, Inc., while we did experience an increase in lead times, we continue to explore means and methods to increase our effectiveness and efficiency of our systems to strive to meet customer demand.

For Dynamic Precision Manufacturing, over this past year we have added four new CNC machining centers and one additional CMM for inspections to assist us in increasing our capacity to meet increased customer orders.  Additionally, we are growing our workforce with new hires and are continuing to position ourselves for increasing customer demand.

Health-Conscious Employment Practices

As outlined above, our dedication to employee health and safety remains at the core of our efforts in operations.  By maintaining a strong focus on the health of each employee and their family, we were able to minimize the impacts of the pandemic on our operations that many other businesses were not as fortunate to experience.  Through the use of different education and intervention plans as well as workforce environmental design, we maintained a strong workforce attendance and output result that allowed for our operations to continue and grow.  While plans are important, our success was actualized by the dedication of the employees to keeping themselves and others safe.

Thank you for continuing to allow us to serve you as a customer, work with you as a collaborator, purchase from you as a vendor, and employ you as a business.  Of the many lessons learned from the pandemic, the one core lesson that we continue to move forward with, is that all of our success is linked together.