NEWS EXTRA: BMF CONFERENCE
MEETING THE COVID CHALLENGE IN MANUFACTURING
Peter Hallitt, Marshalls trading director, told BMF delegates how the group has to adapted to meet Covid challenges.
“IT’S CLEAR THAT Covid is going to be around for the medium term. We are seeing a spike in September and there are predictions for another one in November, so we will have this hanging around for some time in terms of local, regional and even national lockdown,” So said Peter Hallitt, trading director at Marshalls, detailing to the BMF Virtual Conference, how the Covid chalenge has been met by the landscaping group.
“At Marshalls we operated safely from day one; we never actually closed the doors and continued to take orders. We are proud of that fact,” he said. All office-based staff were transferred to working from home at the start and Hallitt said there is no particular plan to go back for the foreseeable future.
“Our manufacturing operations were closed for a short time but are fully operational now that we have an emphasis on social distancing and safe working.”
Hallitt says that Marshalls
saw a mixed response to Covid throughout its merchant supply line. “There were out-right closures, others operated with limited capacity while some stuck to working as normal,” he said, noting that Marshalls was inundated with requests from installers who were still working and wanted to find merchants who could support them with materials. “We did that via our website, showing the importance of a strong digital strategy from day one. We found merchants for those installers and we were able to support merchants by delivering either direct to site or to yards.” Marshalls was one of the companies that announced restructuring early on in the lockdown. “April and May were very, very weak but sales have been extremely strong since then and demand for domestic landscaping products has been extremely strong indeed,” he says. Marshalls took no government furlough money for those employees it made redundant
HOW HAS COVID AFFECTED THE SUSTAINABILITY AGENDA?
Head of sustainability at Travis Perkins group, Megan Adlen, had some take-aways for BMF delegates.
Resilience: Preventative measures reduce costs. I don’t think any of us could have been ready for what happened and is still happening. It shows those major outliers on your risk registers do sometimes materialise. When they do, that’s when we learn the importance of having a resilient business. We’ve all had to think more about our crisis management plans and how we can be ready for future risks. We are only as strong as the weakest link in our chain. We all have long, often global, supply chains, and something like this pandemic can impact that significantly. In this industry, because we are built on such strong relationships, we are probably luckier than others because we do work well with each other. Positive changes that we can hold onto: We all mobilised very quickly to ensure safety first and provide essential services to customers. We have all had to evolve very fast to survive and making changes to our businesses at a
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and Hallitt said the intention is to repay all furlough loans from the government so that the group will be free to act as a plc from now on and pay dividends to shareholders and act as normal. “Our balance sheet is extremely strong; all our operations are working at full speed we are in the process of putting in new capacity. New capacity is going in to a number of sites, although no offices will be open until the New Year. Our forecasts have increased week on week, month on month; they are all going one way and that is up.”
Marshalls may be in the middle of a huge spike in demand, but Hallitt said there is some concern for the medium term. “Forecasts are incredibly difficult. Who would have thought, before lockdown, that you couldn’t get jigsaws, pasta, bikes, gym weights or puppies, timber or plaster? The pandemic has created a new sense of unprecedented demands at a time when we really don’t know what’s coming towards us.”
In the medium-term, the reinvigorated demand on the domestic landscaping front is positive, however the commercial landscaping sector looks less hopeful. “Who is going to invest in a new head office at the moment? Government-led infrastructure will be strong, HS2 is a prime example, and housing looks positive in the short term but it is difficult to tell what will happen post the stamp duty holiday and Help To Buy,” he said.
“Then of course there is Brexit, which is still an issue for those who import from Europe. At Marshalls we are lucky in that we only import 2% of our material, so we are a UK manufacturer based in Scotland, Wales and England.” The biggest lesson Hallitt said that the group learned, was that a resilient supply chain is incredibly important.
“The other lessons we have learned are that things can be done incredibly quickly and well if you put your mind to it. Good people will shine through very quickly. Things are changing rapidly; some of your people love that they can make quick decisions and others are scared of it. “I’m sure that in the future there will be hybrid of working from home and working from an office. I think we are in for some tough times past the spike, and I only hope that we can keep the momentum going.” BMJ
pace we’ve not had to before. It’s shown that when we need to change, we can. That’s really important when you think about climate change and how much we are going to have to change over the next 10 years. Common threats bring people together: Public activism was already becoming more active on climate change and as public awareness continues to increases around the risks on climate change, we can only expect the public to unite further in their expectations of businesses to address this. Digital connectivity: Now we have all developed better digital skills as an industry we will probably continue with less business travel, more home- working and flexible working, video conferencing. All this reduces cost, it reduces carbon and it can improve work/life balance. Increasing digitisation and reducing carbon go hand in hand. What’s important. Covid has given us the chance to evaluate what is important now and in the future. We need to build back the economy, we need to build back better and get the economy moving again. We also need do so in a green way because we have to decarbonise the UK’s housing. The dip in carbon, globally, during lockdown was around 8%. That dip is going to be needed every year for the next 10 years to keep us on track to meet global carbon reduction targets. The UK housing stock accounts for a third of UK carbon emissions so if we are going to meet those emissions targets we are definitely going to have to think about how we do it differently. Collaboration: Working together with customers, suppliers, the government and the end users will continue to be vital. We have to make sure that we keep focused on the bigger picture and it will give us all a better chance of sustainable growth. BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net October 2020
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