Like many companies serving the healthcare industry, our global operations centers are designated as essential businesses because of the critical role we play in the response to the pandemic.

When the Coronavirus crisis began, our priorities became clear: keep our employees healthy and safe; safeguard our supply chain; and support our customers by doing everything possible to keep their product development, sales and manufacturing plans on track.

You will find here the latest update from LTS related to the Corona Virus situation and several resources we found valuable in keeping our business stable and operating during this extraordinary time.

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Keeping Employees Safe
Supporting Lifesaving Products
Safeguarding our Supply Chain
Supporting Customers
Remaining Stable and Vigilant

Keeping our Employees Safe

Based on guidance from the World Health Organization, we have augmented our already robust Business Continuity Plan with specific steps to account for COVID-19: As the situation continues to develop, we have asked employees in select locations to work from home as a precaution, while keeping essential staff at our facilities to keep them open. We have anticipated this scenario as part of our business continuity planning and are equipped to maintain the high-quality, engineering, manufacturing and customer service that the industry has come to expect from us. Our people have been working hard, making a difference and demonstrating amazing resilience in supporting our business.

It goes without saying that, in the current environment, the health and safety of our employees, customers and partners are paramount to us. As such, we have restricted employee travel, both international and domestic. In addition, we have prohibited access to our global engineering and manufacturing sites to external employees, customers and suppliers as a safety measure. Finally, given that many of our customers have implemented similar travel policies, we have instructed employees to leverage technology and conduct internal and external meetings virtually as much as possible.

Supporting Lifesaving Products

For OEM manufacturers in the medical and analytical industries, we manufacture a diverse product portfolio ranging from active thermoelectric coolers and assemblies to temperature controllers and liquid cooling systems that address heat issues and precise temperature control of medical imaging, diagnostics and storage systems.

• Our liquid cooling systems and components control temperatures in CT and MRI medical imaging systems used for neurological and cardiovascular diagnostics, with CT systems playing a vital role in the diagnosis and treatment of the COVID-19 disease. 
• Our thermal cycling and temperature control systems improve the performance and test results for immunoassay analyzers and PCR molecular diagnostic systems, the latter being the primary and highly specific real-time test methodology for this novel coronavirus. 
• Our thermoelectric heat pumps regulate temperatures of liquid chromatography sample storage chambers and incubators used in COVID-19 research and vaccine development.

We feel an increased social responsibility to ensure smooth continuous deliveries to our customers and to keeping our production process running to supply critical, life-saving technology to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Safeguarding our Supply Chain

In these uncertain times, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for governments to commit to uninterrupted critical supply chains and to make all the necessary resources available with which to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider our suppliers essential to healthcare continuity of operations and have urge them to maintain operations to deliver critical goods during this difficult time.

We are working closely with our suppliers to ensure that cross-border medical and other essential goods supply chains can function both effectively and efficiently.  As we successfully re-started our manufacturing facility in China, we are sharing our first-hand experience and learnings with our global suppliers to give them inspiration and guidance that can help them stay open or quickly return to full operations. We are also assisting with communications to relevant authorities that confirms our suppliers' critical role in maintaining the continued operation in the essential healthcare infrastructure.

Supporting Our Customers

Product Development
We have implemented several processes to ensure our customer's design, development and manufacturing plans stay on track. All our communication platforms are digital so, whether our engineers are in the office or working from home, customers continue to have access to our staff via voice, text and video services. In the event that the lead project manager becomes affected, our engineering organization is setup to continue the ongoing tasks with the remaining engineering team. All technical information, analysis and reporting systems are cloud-based with multiple layers of redundancy. This ensures project information is secure, regularly backed up, and remotely accessible at any time.

Manufacturing
We have reached full production capacity in Shenzhen, China facility since having resumed our operations in early March. Our other global operations have remained opened and are recovering fast from any backlog issues, while simultaneously prioritizing medical, diagnostics and all other products essential to the fight against the pandemic. Our global supply chain managers have the expertise to address risks within the supply chain during crisis situations by utilizing supplier tiers, category management and advanced logistics. Our customer service team has been tirelessly reaching out to impacted customers, continuing to conduct regular backlog reviews and keeping our customers up to date on any affected orders. Our sales and customer service representatives are here to assist customers around the clock.

Remaining Stable and Vigilant

While we believe Laird Thermal Systems is well-positioned to work through the current challenges, the COVID-19 situation changes daily. We continue to follow the guidance of the WHO as well as country and state agencies. We remain vigilant and focused on our priorities and are in regular communications with our employees, our site management, our customers and our suppliers.