A statement from SLAC Group

SLAC Group has released a statement from chief operating officer, international and chief marketing officer, Chris McKenzie, reassuring customers that the company is doing all it can to process and deliver orders safely and on time during the Covid-19 crisis:

“We have reported many times that SLAC have been working on The Hive Initiative,” he said. “That is to say we have been helping the industry to move towards using Artificial Intelligence to make what we do in the future when we can’t get personnel in the plants less of a burden – we are moving this up now because unfortunately the future is here, we are adding new tools to monitor and support our customers daily to enact this.

“We in our facility in the resort city of Suzhou, have all returned to work now for some time, we are at 100% manufacturing capacity with some orders delayed slightly through issues outside of our control.”

McKenzie noted how the company has put the following steps in place to ensure SLAC is back to near capacity:

“The extended Chinese New Year vacation enacted by the Government, which was effective, obviously caused us some backlogs but we have added extra shifts to make sure we catch up on lost time. We utilise some US and EU suppliers and have seen issues with some of their deliveries, we continue to work through the supply chain to do our best to make decisions that mitigate this.

“Delivery issues at our customers’ location may be in the next few months problematic as borders close, here in Australia we have closed borders and spatial distancing but the flow of cargo, we hope that this model remains globally, people still need cans for food and beverage.”

“Having gone through these tribulations in the first quarter of the year we to this date have on our books a backlog that equates to over 70% of last year’s total sales, healthy strong and ready for the next three quarters with high expectancies for another year of growth even through adversity.”