Over the last year, we have grown tremendously. We have had customers old and new see how the pandemic changed their business and it has led to them needing more help from their suppliers, like us. In an effort to create a win-win for them and for us, we have taken on work in an aggressive manner that has allowed us to grow in the way we have in the last year. That has not been without its challenges, as we all can see. The work that we have accepted was with the assumption we would do it in a 40-hour week, but would leave overtime optional to keep caught up or slightly ahead.
However, we have fallen behind and have been unable to catch up with volunteer overtime hours. Thus, we have made the difficult decision to institute mandatory overtime for the next 2 weeks, running from March 20th until April 2nd. We are asking for an additional 15 hours from production-related employees during those 2 weeks. Your schedule will be available from your supervisor by 4:30 pm today. If you are able to volunteer more than those 15 additional hours, please see your supervisor immediately.
Many of our customers have had to institute mandatory overtime policies indefinitely including Munters, CAM, Custom Truck, Super Radiator Coils, and more. We believe if we are able to efficiently work in the coming 2 weeks that we will be able to eat into our backlog enough to go back to voluntary overtime afterward. It is not our intention to make this a long-term solution, so we want to do everything we can to make this an effective 2 weeks. We have added 20 people already this year and have another 7 scheduled to start in the coming weeks. We continue to look for good people to hire, so we hope this short 2-week initiative is simply what is needed to catch us up. We will be making a decision on whether this 2-week initiative is sufficient by the end of the day, Monday, March 27th.
This is not an easy decision, but I trust you will understand.
Brian