|
Lessons About Business Destruction
What one company learned from a devastating storm
Print Solutions (Formerly FORM) Magazine, July 1993
BY LAWRENCE L. CURK and RAY WILLMAN
Several years ago, a comedian developed a routine by asking his audience, "At what moment can you tell you're going to have a bad day? Is it when you get up in the morning, and there's a leak in your waterbed and you remember you don't own a water bed? Is it when you rush to work and honk your car horn at the change of a traffic light, not recognizing that there's a cop ahead of you? Or, is it when you hurry from home, get to the office and your boss asks why your wife's pantyhose are hanging out of your belt?"
These are all great lines, but bad days in real life can be devastating. Early on Saturday morning, March 13, our Ocala, Fla., plant was hit by a tornado. Our company, Paper Systems Incorporated headquartered in Springboro, Ohio, is a small paper roll converter for business machine, retail transaction, financial and communication equipment.
The Florida operation, our Southeast plant, serves nine states. Many homes and businesses from Florida to New England suffered unexpectedly from the severe weather in what has become known as "the Storm of the Century."
In times like this, we've found life has a bigger meaning and purpose. If a company handles tough times correctly, the organization can become stronger. Tough times can bring employees together to create a stronger bond. As we discovered, it's not how you walk in life, but who you're willing to walk with that counts. Like most businesses, we had a strategic business plan. Unlike some companies, we had not developed a disaster plan. After all, disasters happen to other businesses, right?
As a result of the tornado, we now have a plant disaster outline. It took us less than a half day to create an operating outline, and much of the plan was implemented the same day. We're not saying we've created an exacting A to Z priority list. This is just what one company did to overcome the instant and unwelcome pain of adversity.
Start-up
After receiving the fateful call and being assured that all our employees were safe and well, we did the following:
- We quickly called our management team and in-house computer personnel to meet at our home plant.
- Then we called our headquarters plant personnel for volunteers to work the weekend. It was important at that point to "produce down" our backlog so we would be in a better position to respond to our Southeast customers' needs.
- Once we gathered at the plant in Springboro, we took all the major ideas listed below and sorted them by category. It was apparent that we needed to group these suggestions and assign them.
For Corporate Management
- Contact local Florida authorities to assess the situation and understand what steps for recovery could be taken.
- Call the insurance company to verify coverage. (Thank goodness our coverage included tornadoes.)
- Call the owner of the Florida building we were leasing to determine his intentions.
- Review capacity at headquarters and skills needed for additional work. Alert Florida management of personnel needed for temporary assignment. For Florida Management
- PSI corporate management re-contacted our Florida plant manager and suggested that he take company identification to the disaster site along with a rental truck and some of our employees. If he could enter the area, we wanted him to take photographs for insurance purposes; remove batteries, instrument panels and other critical components of equipment, such as lift trucks, to discourage would-be thieves; carry out all undamaged business and office equipment, and retrieve important customer files.
- Hire a security guard.
- Rent a temporary office site.
- Seek possible warehouse locations to handle stock product items that would be delivered from headquarters inventory, then re-shipped to Southeastern customers.
- Look for alternative plant sites if the lessor cannot repair the current facility.
- Review personnel that can be transferred to home office plant on an interim basis.
For Office Staff
- Set up incoming 800 number transfer from Florida to home office plant.
- Access detailed Florida backup from headquarters computer system. Then:
- Determine orders in process. Delete and re-enter them into the corporate system.
- Contact Southeastern customers expecting delivery and inform them of a short delay.
- Advise the customers who were to pick up products that we'll ship in two days.
- Divert all raw material purchases to the home office plant in Ohio.
- Call customers who were to receive shipments on Friday and alert them that we will duplicate their orders in case the truck line had problems.
- Pull Florida's inventory count of finished goods and floor inventory.
- Call outside suppliers and order critical components to serve the special needs of our Southeastern customers.
- Call sales reps and key distributors that have a rush on large orders. Then re-establish schedules amenable to both parties.
- Combine plant order needs and re-schedule to identify new dates of delivery.
- Create and send a letter to all Southeastern customers explaining our situation. Establish communication and let them know we are doing all we can and encourage them to be patient with us.
- Call part-time workers and ask for full-time help until we can smooth out our programs.
We hope this story and general disaster guideline encourage others to prepare for the future, and, of course, pray disaster never happens. Thankfully, no one was hurt. In fact, the second shift had shut down only a few hours before the tornado hit. The lessor repaired the building, and everything is intact and operational now.
We thank our customers for standing by us while we adjusted to this detour in our business life. And, we were glad to see that our employees "walked the walk and talked the talk" as we worked together. That's really important. As we said, it's not how you walk in life, but who you walk with and how you work together that counts.
Lawrence L. Curk is president of Paper Systems Incorporated, Springboro, Ohio, and Ray Willman is vice president of manufacturing. Vice President Gene Hayden contributed to this article.