Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
JUNE 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 13 and buying the materials that we needed to make sanitary wipes in gross quantities. Johnson: You're not the only company in this industry that's doing that. More than one com- pany has said that they have the basic knowl- edge and equipment to do this; they're simply making their own. Engle: I'm not surprised. We made such large quantities of hand sanitizer that we were able to send employees home with two bottles every week so that they could feel safer and be safer in this environment. That stuff was ini- tially hard to find. Johnson: Other than cleaning supplies, was there anything that caught you off guard while adapting? Engle: We're a public company, so the board of directors is constantly challenging us. In a meeting at the end of January, I said, "We've invested 30 man-hours to solidifying the crit- ical supply chain, but there were things that we didn't think of because we're not perfectly foresighted." They said, "Don't be surprised to hear anecdotal stories going forward where we're going to get shocked by something that that we sell run on very large, embedded sys- tem controllers that are pretty expensive. The core controller is as much as $4,000 apiece. To say to somebody, "Put $50,000–100,000 of stock on your shelf for us and deliver it within a week when we call for it," that was an out- right "no." We did increase our inventory specifically because of things like that. We were able to do so successfully because, as a company that went through a very violent downturn that I already spoke of in 2000, we realized a long time ago that cash is king. If you want to do business in the way that you need to, then the one thing that allows you to do that is to have a lot of cash. We have what we consider to be a healthy amount of cash, and where we needed to, we deployed it to reinforce our sup- ply chain. That has been our story. The one thing we didn't get enough of right away was cleaning supplies. Because we're a second-tier supplier to medical manufacturing companies, we iden- tified ourselves as essential and realized that we were going to need to be doing nonstop sanitizing and disinfecting of the entire essen- tial workplace area. We put on order a lot of supplies right away. That has probably been the most difficult supply chain to keep filled. Johnson: Not your primary sup- ply chain, but your support sup- ply chain for basic business oper- ations. Engle: Yes. Getting our employees masks and sanitizing wipes has probably been the most challeng- ing thing, but we're tied hand in glove to a lot of chemical compa- nies because our customers are spraying chemistries. We have a lot of very strong relationships with companies that supply us with test chemicals. We also ordered all the ingredients to make our own sanitizing solutions and have been doing that all along. We've been making our own hand sanitizer Sono-Tek employees inspecting a production unit.