COVID-19 updates: El.En. during the lockdown

The world has been grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic since March. Governments have tried to limit the spread of the virus by limiting the movement of people. Schools, offices and production activities considered non-essential have stopped. Suddenly, thousands of companies have faced an unprecedented health crisis, that has quickly become an economic crisis.

Our first concern was to protect the health of our employees. Our strength lies in the people who work with us every day, continuously guaranteeing the production of our products. We immediately took rigorous safety measures to protect them, reduced the number of staff members on site, slowed down our production where possible, and promoted remote work as much as possible.

At the same time, we have remained close to our main customers. We know that in this period, it is essential for companies that use our lasers to stay active. Many of these companies responded to the emergency by converting their businesses into the production of personal protective equipment. Our customer service has always remained open for all our clients, especially the ones helping to fight the pandemic.

We have done our utmost to help clients suffering from a decline in orders by postponing scheduled deliveries, offering discounted prices on laser systems to the companies helping the collective effort against COVID-19, as well as continuously giving technical support to guarantee that the emergency productions could be as efficient as possible and run smoothly.

As it often happens, opportunities can also arise from crises. Our El.En. team decided to use the government imposed break as a useful moment to perfect the way we work and our products. We have been able to carry out long overdue engineering works needed to improve the quality of our products which had been pushed back due to an excess of orders.

In addition to this, we have done our best to optimize the automation of our laser sources and scanning heads’ production lines, thus turning the production of our laser systems even more fluid, repeatable and lean. These changes should help to increase our quality levels whilst reducing the costs of our products in order to meet the needs of an increasingly demanding market. Once we overcome this world crisis, we must be ready with increasingly dynamic and powerful products.

Furthermore, alongside some of our partners and other El.En. group companies, we have developed laser cutting machines dedicated to the production of face masks and disposable personal protective devices such as gowns and visors. We have also begun a project to build machines for cutting methacrylate screens. These separators will represent an important tool for a gradual return to normality.

At El.En., we took the fundamental decision not to shut down, convinced it would be easier that way to pick up speed and get back to normal production levels once the emergency is over. In the post-pandemic world, there will be an ever increasing need for personal protective equipment and laser technology is the best tool to obtain quick, efficient and high quality productions.