Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
14 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 els did not warrant a doubling of the cost. I helped them go back to their suppliers and say, "This is not right. You're artificially driving up cost, and we're not going to accept it." Two surprises happened. The first one is that I'm kind of a commu- nity partner to another larger man- ufacturing company. Someone from the company called me, lamenting the fact that he was going to have to lay off and shut down. I said, "Aren't you a second- or third-tier sup- plier to an essential industry?" He responded, "Yes, the transportation industry." So, I said, "Then you can't shut down. If you do shut down, you'll be doing the transportation industry a disservice." He mulled it over and called me back, and I was surprised that he had not been thinking about that as opposed to taking at face value what other people were telling him. He looked into it himself and made the decision to self-iden- tify as an essential business. They stayed open and did the same thing we did, such as split- ting our employees by shift and distancing to minimize the contacts, setting up a disinfect- ing program, etc. I was also surprised that not everyone was looking for opportunities to figure out how to stay open. We've moved all of our medi- cal customers' orders to the front of the line, but we're still taking orders for everything. And regarding those big, powerful, expensive controllers? Those come from overseas, but they're distributed by a company in California. A few weeks into the governor's shutdown of New York, I was told that we weren't going to get any controllers from them because none of their employees were allowed to go into the warehouse to even grab one that was on the shelf and put it into shipping to send it out to us. They were prohibited from being able to do that. We got on the phone with the operations manager for that distributor and said, "You need to know that this controller that I'm requesting is for a medical machine. It's for a we never expected." The truth is it didn't happen in our supply chain for regular parts because of the tariff situation. The tariff situation that the President was battling out with China revealed a lot of sur- prises, where some of our vendors that we thought were not related to the Chinese market at all were. We have a policy of the most local sourcing that's reasonable for the company. We believe that if we employ our neighbor's com- pany as much as we can, we'll have a better community and more enriching lives for our employees. We make it a point to ensure that as many purchase orders as possible are sent to the most local possible vendor, and we've made a lot of vendors in the area stronger as a result of that. But a lot of our supply chain had already been tested because of the tariff situation. I studied our supply chain deeply as a result of the tariff situation before the virus because I suspected that a couple of the vendors were misrepre- senting things. Our sheet metal people were saying that all of the sheet metal costs were going to have to double for the cost of materi- als because of the tariffs. I invited them to join me on some websites where you could see the spot prices of stainless steel, aluminum, etc. I showed them that the pricing of those lev- Precision bench work under way at Sono-Tek.