An update from Nordell Ltd 

Nordell is one of the UK’s leading independent Plastics Manufacturing and Design refinement companies based in Worthing, West Sussex and offering a comprehensive range of Dedicated Services to complement our core Plastic Injection moulding and Extrusion manufacturing business. Nordell are proud and active members of Worthing and Adur Chamber.

The current Covid-19 situation has certainly produced several challenges for Paul Mason, Nordell Managing Director and his 80 strong team; “Never in our lifetime have we experienced such a challenge to human health and the economy”

Nordell has remained fully operational as an essential business manufacturing parts for vital sectors such as medical and pharmaceutical, however with a significant change to our working practices. We reacted very quickly and implemented new working controls ahead of the UK Governments advice; this included temperature checking employees on arrival (giving a huge sense of security to the team), ensuring sufficient distancing in the work space and rest spaces, reorganising the working week and more than doubling access to hand sanitisation to name but a few. Where we have team working at home, we are maintaining a high level of communication through twice daily check-in’s on Microsoft Teams; a valuable an interesting technology especially for the nosey ones who have enjoyed checking out small snippets of their colleagues homes!

We received more than a dozen letters from our customers advising Nordell of the “essential” nature of the parts we produce. Nordell has a diverse customer base, however most of the parts we manufacture, and supply are used in the production of Healthcare, medical, pharmaceutical and Food processing equipment; some directly going into critical ventilator systems.

When the UK Government raised their concern over the shortfall of ventilators required in the fight against Covid-19, we engaged with some of our local manufacturing counterparts in the Worthing and Adur Chamber to put a proposal together for the manufacture of ventilators using our combined skills. This never progressed following the UK Governments award of contracts to several very capable and significant UK manufactures. The exercise was very useful though, as it proved how local businesses could collaborate in times of crisis.

As for Nordell’s business, we must count ourselves lucky that we have managed to maintain our business and in fact are still managing to grow despite the challenges. It’s true that we have seen huge growth in accounts where our parts are used in the Covid-19, whilst other accounts have seen a significant decline as they are directly linked to the retail sectors. We have been able to keep the whole team working; however, a significant amount of time has been spent reviewing the various Government support options and reviewing our risk exposure. Our heartfelt thoughts go out to all the Adur & Worthing & Global businesses who have been impacted through no fault of their own. I am sure somewhere there are some learnings to come from the current situation and we must all remain positive about the future.

Our membership of Worthing and Adur Chamber is very worthwhile. The Chamber are fantastic representatives for local businesses and can represent local business on a national level. We were able to join a Webinar in March with Tim Loughton; Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, organised by Worthing and Adur Chamber. When the UK Government initially announced the Lockdown of non-essential business, there was no mention of manufacturing being included on the essential or key workers list. The subject was raised with the Chamber, seeking clarification which was raised with Tim Loughton and then answered on the Webinar. Not long afterwards the Government clarified the position of UK manufacturing as “essential”.

Despite all the significant challenges and the slightly quieter office, we have been able to use the time to review and focus on what matters most to all our stakeholders, by reviewing our structure and processes; getting back to basics to ensure we are LEAN and productive and not wasteful.

Returning to full normality seems a long way off, however, hopefully we will all be able to return to some sort of normality soon, albeit with significant additional controls. We will all learn from this experience and come out stronger for it.

www.nordell.co.uk