Result of my today’s short „blitz“ visit to our factory – everything exactly as expected

Hi everybody. Good to see You again here in my blog. This post is going to be a very special one. Believe it or not - this is my first post which I write in my office at our factory in Itatiba. 

Since almost 5 months I am working at home in our house in Vinhedo and I have come only very rarely to our company during all this time. But this does not at all mean, that I work less or that any of my responsabilities and duties have been neglected. 

It`s just a different way of doing things for many of us compared to before the outbreak of Covid-19. And I must admit, that I really like it. Anyhow during the last years I have been travelling a lot and due to this I have not been in my office in Itatiba for longer periods. Thus for me and my colleagues actually only little has changed now. But for sure - life and work have changed dramatically for most of our approximately 50 Vulkan do Brasil employees, who also mainly work from their homes since march 18.

As today is saturday, it is quite normal, that only a handful of our colleagues are working in our factory. Differently to the situation which I found when I joined this beautiful company about 6 years ago, today we are very seldomly running behind "emergencies". For sure we attend all kinds of urgent customer needs, because we fully support them and contribute to keep their processes and installations running and whenever one of our customers suffers an unplanned breakdown of equipment or misses urgently needed solutions and products, we immediately set up all necessary extraordinary work plans and work 24 hours during 7 days or more, if necessary. But to be true, this is not so often really necessary.

But this makes self-evidently part of our total commitment to our Brazilian, Latin American and worldwide customers in all kinds of industries like mining, iron & steel, cement & construction materials, sugar & ethanol, bulk materials handling, ports, energy generation and many others more.

For the execution of our normal customer orders there is practically no more hecticness in our factory. We have several since years reorganized all our internal processes and our factory has become the famous "Swiss clockwork" (I will explain this in more details in a future post here in my blog). All work processes are beeing planned in detail and normally just happen smoothly. This gives us an enormous control of our productivity, efficiencies and quality, which is fundamental for our customers and contributes massively to our high competitivity and attractiveness for them. 

For these reasons I was not surprised but very pleased to see our whole factory very nicely clean and organized even during this "surprise visit" on a saturday morning with only a few of my colleagues working there.

On the above foto I am together with my colleague Ze Roberto, Operations Supervisor, who organizes and controls all activities at our factory today. 

Now the weekend can begin for me and in the afternoon as well for my colleagues, which have been working at our factory today, as well. 

I wish all of You a very nice day and good first half of this wonderful weekend. See You here again in my blog tomorrow.