With Covid 19 pandemic, the overall industrial operations have changed. This has made industry cautious about the hygiene and safety of their workforce. Additionally, government guidelines and some safety norms are also pushing more business to industries involved in the test and measurement segment with detections and safety systems. Manish Poudwal, Chairman & Managing Director, Subtronics India Pvt Ltd delves into the current market challenges for business in such testing times with Industrial Products Finder (IPF) in a video interaction.

How do you serve the industry with your products?
Our products and its applications cater to industries like food and chemicals. We serve solutions like breath analysers at points of entry of the plants and other embellishments like power plants, defence sectors, hospitals. If there is gas, we have our gas detection systems installed. For logistics and clinical research operations our range of breath analysis has due importance. Our metal detection systems have regular requirements at malls, theatres, and security frisking for metal objects etc.

Our gas detection business has a regular client business cycle. However, due to the government norms on pollution and safety where sectors like fisheries, retail, food are required to install a detection system for gas or metal, have recently shown a spike in demand for these applications.

Do you think that post-Covid 19, due to an increase in safety consciousness, will there be a rise in demand for your products?
Yes. This Covid 19 situation has worked for us due to an increase in awareness and safety consciousness. The norms and guidelines are positively pushing our products. There are certain products that we already had and some are being developed. There is a lot of stress on the industry to have your entry and exits mandated and we already are present there with our products like breath analysers.

In the initial days of Covid 19, we had received a lot of enquiry for Covid 19-detection kits while we have only been associated with the electronics of it. Even though we are contemplating developing them at our R&D facility and we will launch some new products to impart safety.

How has Covid 19 impacted you? How are you tackling these challenges?
We must accept that times are difficult. Clients have temporarily stopped conducting breath analysis at the site to maintain hygiene. Further, it is not possible to conduct a breath analysis test without being close to the machine. We have developed new solutions to avoid physical contact while conducting a breath analysis test.

Activities like site servicing have halted for a while due to Covid 19. Further, some of our products will now have to be recalibrated to avoid any physical contact, looking at Covid 19. This has impacted business and industry at large.  Even in terms of our products in gas detection, all our AMCs have temporarily stopped. We can’t send or depute our people to our 4,500 clients for the same.
In terms of raw material, due to no transport all that has stalled. Thus, our deliveries have stopped. We have opted for the virtual way to service our clients in the absence of a physical servicing medium. We are active in our marketing and sales. We are connected with our workforce online.

All kinds of activities like purchases, sourcing, and delivery have stopped as the overall movement of goods has stopped. We are waiting for the conditions to improve.

 How ready are you to resume your operations and get your supply chain in place? We are ready with all precautionary measures to resume our operations. These include facilities like Covid 19 detection kits, sanitisation booths, social distancing, and marked boxes for the same. We have also passed on and briefed our workforce online about the necessary guidelines to be followed as issued by the government.

Our cloud-based operations are in place and upgraded recently. An employee by logging in can access and connect with company operations from wherever he/she is. We had not anticipated this time would come, but such a system is a boon to our operations.

Our stocks are ready for supply as soon as the government allows us to do so. We have had a record of 98 per cent timely deliveries and we will try to maintain that.

The recent packages issued by the government for MSMEs have passed on some relief but have not offered immediate relief. We are expecting better packages from the government.