Sam delivers a leadership message from April 17, 2020, on keeping the Mannheim manufacturing factory running during COVID-19. The focus is maintaining spare parts supply, protecting employees, and supporting customers through the crisis.
Dear fellow customers, today I'm talking to you here out of Mannheim and we're living in unprecedented time of a pandemic. However, we try to do everything to keep our operations running in the factory, to produce spare parts and machinery, to keep our spare parts distributed to you, and certainly to enable our dealers be open and up and running as well. Hello from Mannheim factory. As you can see, we are restarting production. The factory was closed, but we are back in business fulfilling our mission to serve you, our customers. We faced some shortages of components and we used the time to set up a corona robust manufacturing environment protecting our employees here in the factory. We understand the difficulties to run your farm with the current lack of seasonal workers, an uncertain market outlook and social distancing regulations. We also know how critical it is just now to keep the business and your machines running. And for that, spare parts and services are essential. And here's our parts operations is fully committed to keep your business running. First, our global network has enough inventory to ensure parts availability. Second, through our flexible logistics network, we continue to serve every country in the region. Third, all of our warehouses in Europe are fully operational. So we appreciate your business and we will get through this together. Fortunately, and thanks God we are in agriculture because agriculture around the region, around the world these days gets a new image and is seen as essential or system relevant. And that's of course very, very important. We, we actually at John Deere are inspired to deliver our services to you, to keep you up and running in the field. And that's an inspiration that we have because we want to say in a year from now, we did it better than anybody else. So thank you again for trusting John Deere. Our connected support, our wireless connection to the machine enables us to do support and services much better than before. And of course in these days that's more important than ever. So I wish you personally well. Hope you can stay in business as well. Hope of course, that you and the people in your family and your employees will be health and safety during this period because the world needs agriculture and farmers like never before. Thank you very much, Sam.
