19APRIL, 2022What are some of the challenges that The COVID-19 pandemic has presented for manufacturing industry? Please elaborate.Stanley Black & Decker has been focused on delivering against three key priorities throughout the pandemic: ensuring the safety and health of our employees, continuing to serve our customers and maintaining our financial strength, and doing our part to help communities and governments mitigate the effects of the virus. These priorities align with the challenges that many manufacturing companies have faced over the past 12 months.The most important of these challenges was protecting employees and keeping them safe as well as their customers, families, and communities. At Stanley Black & Decker, we took immediate action even before the pandemic was in full force. In January 2020, we anticipated that demand for PPE would increase significantly in the weeks and months to come. The safety of our employees is our top priority, and we deemed it essential to ensure that we had an adequate supply of PPE to protect our manufacturing workforce. In mid-January, we made the decision to pre-emptively buy 100,000 face masks from a local supplier in China to bolster our existing supply. This additional supply helped us when PPE became virtually impossible to acquire. It also enabled us to provide masks to employees for their families to help mitigate community spread which turned out to be a greater risk.Second, in late January, we encouraged all our employees to return early from their Chinese New Year travels. We were expecting the government to announce nationwide lockdowns before the end of the holiday, and once the lockdown was official, employees who weren't already back in the region before the lockdown would not be able to come to work for many weeks or even months. Around 1,000 employees returned early, which allowed us to quickly restart our operations in early February, once the government gave us permission to do so.In the following months, we took similar action in locations around the world, which provided highly effective in protecting our employees. In fact, our safety measures meet and often significantly exceed those required. They include temperature screenings, social distancing measures, continuous cleaning and sanitation, virtual work for employees who are able to do so, and more. These measures helped us navigate a second challenge: maintaining business continuity. Nearly 600 of our vendors and suppliers were also impacted by the pandemic, revealing single-source dependencies across our supply chain.The pandemic caused a perfect storm of disruption to supply first, then to demand, and finally to working practices starting in China and spreading across the globe. How will this propel changes in the manufacturing industry?The pandemic has led to the acceleration of two trends: THE PANDEMIC AND THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY By Mark Maybury, Chief Technology Officer, Stanley Black & Decker [NYSE:SWK]INSIGHTSMark Maybury is Stanley Black & Decker's first Chief Technology Officer. In this position, Mark manages a team across the company's businesses and functions and advises on technological threats and opportunities, as well as provides access to all elements of the global technology ecosystem. Prior to joining Stanley Black & Decker, Mark spent 27 years at The MITRE Corporation, where he held a variety of strategic technology roles. Most recently he served as Vice President of Intelligence Portfolios and prior to that was MITRE's Vice President and Chief Security Officer and Director of the National Cybersecurity Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). Before joining MITRE, Mark served as a U.S. Air Force officer. He later returned to the Air Force as Chief Scientist from 2010 to 2013 where he advised the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Air Force on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.Mark Maybury
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