New Zealanders have spent a month in lock-down bubbles during Covid-19 alert level 4, staying home, breaking the chain of transmission and saving lives.
As businesses scrambled to respond to Covid-19 protocols, there was a lot of talk about what was truly essential to maintain our population in lockdown.
There were some obvious essential services such as our hospitals and supermarkets, but what about our financial institutions, food producers, transport providers moving our food and essential products, our prisons and Government Departments, utility providers keeping the power on, the internet connecting us all and the water coming out of our taps?
At UPS Power Solutions, we recognised that we provide our customers, and by extension their customers, confidence that power will not disrupt their business operations.
The internet stays on, as do the ventilators in the Intensive Care Wards, the production lines in our factories continue to operate and the EFTPOS machines can take our money and process the transactions at one of the trading banks data centres.
Essential Strategy
As we entered the level 4 lockdown, we implemented Covid-19 Health and Safety protocols and communicated to our essential services customers that we stood ready to support their operations should they need us during the lockdown.
As we near the end of lockdown, we are reflecting on which essential services required our support over the last month. Our Engineers were not nearly as busy as they would normally be, but when called upon to keep New Zealand working they donned their PPE and joined the scores of seen and unseen essential workers who have shown up to work so that the rest of us can stay home, stay safe and save lives.
Where we’ve been needed
We have run the numbers and it is not all that surprising to find that we spent the most of our time keeping power/water and communications operating, closely followed by our support of the healthcare sector.
We are very proud to have been able to contribute and live our mission:
“To lead the UPS industry by providing quality equipment, superior customer service, technical innovation and on time delivery. We realise we cannot exist without the support of our customers, suppliers and staff and we will treat them all with integrity and professionalism.”
Helping Hands
Through our Helping Hands initiative, we have continued our support of the Student Volunteer Army who have set up grocery delivery services for those that are aged 65+, medically vulnerable and for healthcare workers and their families.
Looking to the future
As we head into Alert level 3, we can apply our experiences from supporting essential services customers to ensure we can safely support all our customers.
While we will still be proceeding a little differently, with some staff working from home, our warehouses are operating and well stocked and our UPS engineers are standing ready to ensure that the last thing our customers need to worry about is their power.
We are looking forward to reconnecting with customers and doing what we have always done, working hard to support their businesses and operations with clean and consistent power.