I hope this letter finds you and your families well.

I wanted to write to you to update you on our current position and hopefully provide answers to questions that you might have about how things are still being affected by COVID-19.

Staff

We have almost all staff returned from Furlough at this time. We have some office staff still Furloughed; This is primarily down to the office space available to us and the way the office is configured. We are practicing social distancing in the workplace and have prevented staff from facing one another in the office environment wherever possible. We hope to be able to bring staff back soon and are planning ways to achieve this.

Lead times

We are currently seeing our lead times increased out beyond our standard lead times. I fully appreciate that this is frustrating, and I wish it were not the case. There are a few reasons which have resulted in the need to do this:

• Supply Chain – We are currently seeing products out of stock at a rate that I cannot recall seeing previously. To put this into perspective, MFC supplied by Egger has had the lead time extended by 2.5 weeks. Door and drawer components from Hettich and Blum had seen large numbers of items out of stock. Fortunately, disruption here has been kept to a minimum owing to large stocks held here which we have been able to supply in most cases. It is only in extreme cases that these items have been missing from deliveries and this has been unavoidable, but extending lead times as assisted us to supply a complete product.

• Shift Timings – At present we are running a single shift. The business has weathered the storm of March-June, during which time we supported our staff and customers where possible. We do not have the capacity to justify an additional shift at this time, and it would be commercially unviable at this time to run a shift that wasn’t at full capacity; I am sure that like many of you, the losses incurred in March-June has caused you to scrutinise the un-economical parts of your businesses.

• Demand – we are seeing a large amount of pent-up demand which has resulted in our order book being particularly high. This is compounded by more customers requesting shorter than usual lead times which means our short-term order book is at capacity.

Delivery information

We are still asking customers to provide detailed information about deliveries, particularly when delivering to site. It is vital that our drivers are not placed at unnecessary risk and any households who are isolating or exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 are not delivered to. I would like to thank you for your assistance in this to date and ask that you continue to provide this essential information to us for the foreseeable future.

What next?

We have plans in place to increase capacity in October and I wanted to talk about how we are doing this. As you may recall, we purchased a Beam saw last year to support our manufacturing. The installation of this was delayed owing to shut down, but I can now report that this is installed and operational. We are in the process of moving certain production items on to this, which will allow us to increase the capacity of cabinets we are manufacturing each week. This is quite time consuming and requires new programmes to be written for each item, but we are doing this as quickly as possible. We have an additional drilling machine arriving in around 4 weeks which will allow the Beam saw to also cut some of our more straight-forward units. We will be phasing the manufacturing of our EXPRESS range of products over to this manufacturing line, which in turn should see an increase in capacity of around 23-25%.

Door Edging

You may have been impacted recently by a series of breakdowns to our door edger. We have been working with numerous engineers to get back on track with this machine, but in the short to mid term we have decided to make the necessary investment to replace it. Further to this then we are looking at introducing a second door edger cell to make us less vulnerable to machine break downs. As I write we have normal operation on our door edging but have a replacement machine being installed in 3 weeks time, with further replacement edger’s being installed over the Christmas shutdown. This will allow us to deal with the increase in volume through popularity and due to the fantastic range of new colours, which we are anticipating will create further demand.

With almost all operations back online now then we are seeing a huge surge in business which is greatly appreciated. We will still be working on extended lead times, but we are working to bring these down to the absolute minimum. Thank you for your business. If you have any suggestions or feedback about how we can improve then please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Best wishes,

Tom