Bresan Footwear: Covering costs main priority now

Pietermaritzburg, KZN, SA – We started up after 2 days of preparing our factory to comply with the new OHS Act. It has been a hectic 2 weeks and the exact number of employees we are permitted to have on site has been a bit confusing. We have been operating with 30% of our staff for the past 2 weeks, which has not been financially viable at all. I have erred on the side of caution to avoid any further run-ins with the law, but following last week's email from SAFLEC and the DTI we are now starting to move up to 50% staff for the CMT of safety boots. One of our biggest challenges at the moment is trying to do staff rotation, which is very difficult given the skill sets required to achieve outputs. At these low levels we have started with our multi-skilled operators so we can move people around and are now in the process of bringing in the lesser skilled to increase outputs. We currently have some staff working a 3-day week, some working a 2-day week and key staff working a 5-day week. We are looking at ways to rotate further staff, but skill is a major issue and as time moves on we will be calling in more staff on a rotational basis. However we have to be very mindful that staff rotation leads to quality problems and that is something that we can ill afford at this moment in time. Adding further to our skills challenge is that we have a number of very good operators who have health issues which make them high risk and thus unable to return to work at the moment. It is far from ideal but being able to produce enough to cover costs is our main priority at present, profit is something we don’t intend to see for many months to come.
       On the CMT side, we have a lot of work in process, with nothing being cancelled to my knowledge. We are under a lot of pressure to get CMT work out, but with our current staff complement we are only producing around 650 pairs per day, which is way off our normal target. Starting this week, with the additional staff, we are hoping to increase that up to around 900 pairs per day. Our shoe making side is a mixed bag. We have had a number of cancelations but more requests to delay delivery to later in the year. We haven’t started our shoe making side yet due to the AL4 restrictions and not wanting to have too many staff in the factory at any given time, but in the weeks ahead we are going to have to consider some sort of rotation to satisfy the few customer orders we have.
       At this stage we haven’t experienced any staff refusing to return to work. We have had a few raising concerns over people coming from areas which are rumoured to contain Covid19 outbreaks. I am not sure if the rumours around these areas are true, but it is a very concerning situation. For now all we can do is follow the OHS protocols to reduce employee risk. - Men's casual footwear manufacturer and CMT safety footwear upper manufacturer