Dear Customers,
Another week has passed under COVID-19 emergency situation.
Currently Latvia looks as follows:
- The COVID-19 tests done in the country – 25 913 per million inhabitants (49 235 in total)
- COVID-19 positive 430 per million inhabitants (818 in total)
- We have 13 reported death cases
- During the week from 20.04 till 27.04 the number of infected people varied from 20 to 4 a day.
We will have the emergency situation till the 12th of May and the government says that it will continue perhaps with some minor improvements. We still have our National holidays on the 1st and 4th of May and hopefully it will not increase the number of infected people.
Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs had organized several re-patriation flights for its citizens last week and also this week some hundreds of our people will get home.
It is already the 7th week we are under the cloud of COVID-19 and we as a production company get more and more worried about our people and equipment. Last week our production management realized the impact of the changed shift schedule not to let employees from different shifts meet and have enough time for disinfection of the equipment and premises, therefore a lack of productive time: we lost 2 hours a day x 30 days a month = 60 hours a month, which in fact means that each machine lost 1,5 weeks a month of its productive time. And now we start noticing the difference!
Heidelberg sent us a letter saying that technicians from Germany will not be able to visit us while we are in emergency situation. It means we have to deal with repairs of printing presses ourselves as much as we can and if we cannot, we just stop the machine.
Before COVID-19 we managed to finish the installation of our first new XL press and we have started printing on it, but it has “children’s” diseases which makes us lose some time every day. The local Heidelberg technicians have put together units of the second new XL press but for the electronic part we need experts from Germany and Switzerland. The same with our 3rd new press (UV 4-colour), which is unpacked and waiting for the installation.
There are many jobs being moved forward by our clients for a week, then for another week etc. If you know, that you will not need the book for a month or two or even five, please tell us, so that we can free our production schedule of jobs, which will not come so soon. In this case we could also use the paper booked for such orders for other jobs and not keep our warehouse overloaded. Same regards to those orders which you transport yourselves – if you know you will keep them in our export warehouse for some period of time, please warn us upfront, so that we do not lose time hurrying to produce them, but then they are not picked up as planned originally. Let us work hand in hand, exchange information openly and do our best!
To finish on the light side, we are sending you a performance of our folkdance choreographer Dagmara Barbale, who alone has created a dance as a symbol for the given situation – we are as birds in a cage! She danced this about 250 times to get each square similar to the others!
Watch it, stay safe and smiling!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKJzUwilMkg&t=29s
Livonia Print Team
