Gilbarco Veeder-Root is closely monitoring updates regarding COVID-19 to ensure the safety of our employees and to minimize the impact on our customers.
The COVID-19 coronavirus is having a profound impact on every industry—including ours. We are aware of the uncertainty and want to share what we're doing here at Gilbarco to help address this.
Out of an abundance of caution for the safety and well-being of our employees and their families, Gilbarco has banned all non-essential travel globally in addition to banning all travel to countries identified by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as Level 1-3 risks. We have also required all employees to disclose personal travel to high-risk countries or travel on cruises, per the CDC recommendations.
Any exceptions to the travel ban will require senior leadership approval and will be limited to only instances that are essential to business operation and that can only be accomplished in person—and not via remote communication—and which don’t create any undue health risks.
At Gilbarco’s Greensboro campus a measure has been employed to reduce person-to-person contact to minimize any potential spread of the virus. This action—called “social distancing”—is taken to reduce contact among individuals and ensure workspaces are not congested, large group meetings are not held, and the concentration of people in close spaces is minimized. With these goals in mind, we are taking a variety of steps to stagger start times, breaks and lunch breaks, conduct virtual meetings, and ensure working areas are less concentrated.
Additionally, we have identified groups of workers who are able do their jobs remotely to reduce the number of people in the Greensboro facility. The goal of this action is to improve the health and safety for all employees who are required to be in the facility to ensure production continues with minimum interruption.
In addition to the actions on social distancing, we have implemented additional steps to ensure the Greensboro campus continues to be safe for all employees and to make sure the business operates uninterrupted to meet our customers’ needs. Some of those additional actions being taken include:
- Ensuring over 50% of our Passport Help Desk operators are able to access our systems from home and taking steps to transition this to 100% by the end of this week
- Enabling 100% of our Service Station Equipment (SSE) and Technical Assistance Center (TAC) representatives to work remotely
- Making our customers our top priority by ensuring our field engineers continue to service our customer’s sites while following all appropriate guidelines from local, state and federal health organizations
- Prohibiting visitors to the Greensboro campus
- Eliminating meetings of over 20 people in a room
- Creating space between people in a work area
- Augmenting existing cleaning protocol to include additional cleaning of production workstations and personal work areas
- Reinforcing behavioral guidelines around social distancing and personal hygiene
Gilbarco has assembled a dedicated team that is closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation to ensure we follow the latest directives from local, state, and federal health officials.
At the same time, our teams around the world are working to ensure uninterrupted service to customers by staying in close communication with representatives across the global supply chain. Those teams are:
- Contacting all suppliers and service providers to assess individual situations (affected or unaffected by COVID-19)
- Requiring all suppliers to notify Gilbarco within 24 hours if any employee has contracted the virus Requiring suppliers to match Gilbarco’s policy prohibiting—or at a minimum, limiting—visitation to their facility
- Tracking the following for all suppliers that have been impacted by COVID-19
- On-hand inventory
- Status of facility (operational or shut down)
- Percent (%) capacity that facility is currently operating at
- Known supply chain issues (with details)
- Next shipment timing and confirmation of shipment
- Managing within the global supply chain organization to review daily updates from suppliers
At this time, Gilbarco’s supply chain has not been adversely affected and our Greensboro production facility continues to operate at full capacity. Additionally, the recent closing of all North Carolina schools has had no negative impact on our production facility. However, we are aware that this is an evolving situation and we will communicate any changes as they occur.