Thermal camera checks temperature of team member at Reading Truck Group’s Reading plant entrance. Photo: Reading Truck Group
The global coronavirus pandemic was still just starting its deadly assault on the U.S. in early March when executives and managers of service body maker Reading Truck Group began planning for the worst.
Those efforts would help the company restart operations after a two-week shutdown at its largest facility in Reading, Pa., and ensure that the rest of its approximately dozen locations across the country could keep moving while barely skipping a beat.
“We’re still maintaining very, very good performance,” said Jim Brodie, vice-president of operations. “In fact our efficiencies have continued to creep up, our quality has continued to improve, so what we’re finding is we really have not missed a step.”
Measures Reading has taken include temperature checks, facial recognition, wearing of masks, text alerts, an employee hotline, social distancing, and splitting up the plant into zones with separate break rooms and entrances.
As of early June, Reading reported that no cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, had originated at any of its manufacturing and upfitting facilities. The only four Reading employees to test positive all caught the disease at home from members of their households, Brodie said.
In a recent interview with Service Truck Magazine, Brodie discussed in detail what Reading is doing in response to the pandemic. Those efforts began in early March just as the scope of the crisis was coming into focus. On March 1, the U.S. had only 62 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and no deaths, according to World Health Organization figures. Globally the death count had already reached 2,986, the vast majority in China where the virus had originated in late 2019. But by March 15, the global death toll reached 6,542 while the U.S. death count stood at 41. Less than three months later, on June 8, the U.S. death toll had surpassed 110,000 while the global toll topped 400,000.
Task force formed
“We did a lot discussing of how are we going to react if or when we got our first COVID case,” Brodie said. “And as we were having our discussions, we actually had an indication that we had a positive case in one of our facilities.”
That case in early March turned out to be negative. But it prompted the company to begin planning for what was looking like the inevitable.
“So rather than waiting for an issue to hit and then react to it, we started trying to anticipate what could possibly happen and what would be the appropriate response to it,” Brodie said.
Among the first actions were to create a COVID task force as well as a hotline where employees could speak with the company nurse or a doctor.
“It took all the noise out of it because all of us are manufacturing guys and we’re not medical professionals,” Brodie said, adding that “it helped us to respond appropriately and not to overreact.”
That happened even before Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf issued an order to shut down non-life-sustaining businesses in the state. In compliance, on March 20, Reading shuttered the main Reading Truck Body manufacturing plant in Reading itself, as well as the Reading Truck Equipment operation in Bowmansville, Pa.
Just over two weeks later, the company received an exemption that designated it as a life-sustaining business. That enabled the company to resume operations in Reading on April 7. Reading had also briefly suspended its replacement parts manufacturing although its parts distribution center remained open. The company’s manufacturing plant in Claremore, Okla., also stayed open the whole time.
Decision tree
One of the first activities of Reading’s COVID-19 task force was to create a decision tree, Brodie said. That way if an incident were to happen at a site and time when no executives were available, it would provide “a very easy playbook for whoever the site lead was to react appropriately,” Brodie said. That playbook is already in its eighth revision.
During the shutdown, a plan was devised for how to operate safely once production resumed. That included social distancing, tents, portable toilets, and hand-washing stations.
“We divided the plant into six different zones each with their own break areas,” Brodie said. “That was really the easy part — giving them a safe working environment.”
Even before the pandemic, the Reading plant had a staff nurse on site as well as doctor on retainer who came in once a week. Each day at 9 a.m. the company conducts a conference call with 41 participants who represent every facility and include site leads, human resources personnel and employee health and safety professionals.
“We review any potential cases, any employees that ought to be tested,” Brodie said. “We review any results of testing.”
They also go over the latest guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Centers for Disease Control “because they’re changing almost on a daily basis,” Brodie said.
Early in the reopening, nervous energy reverberated throughout the plant as COVID-19 dominated the news and people’s minds wandered toward worst-case scenarios. Even though it was flu and allergy season, whenever someone got sick, their coworkers would wonder if that person had contracted COVID. To ease minds, the company started pushing out daily text messages to let them know how many employees had contracted the viruses, and more importantly, how many had recovered and returned to work.
Nervous energy calmed
“Once we started communicating using text messaging, the nervous energy kind of dissipated and everything just calmed in the plant,” Brodie said.
Before the pandemic, Reading had 1,137 employees in total. About 700 of them were working at the main manufacturing plant. Of late, that number is down to about 400 because of social distancing and the reduction to two shifts from three.
“Since the pandemic hit, we have some folks that are on furlough, and some plants have shut down for a period of time just until our OEMs can get back up and start producing chassis again,” Brodie said.
So far in 2020, the main plant has experienced a 15 percent increase in labor efficiency with the most notable gains starting in April with the implementation of the COVID safety measures. Brodie attributed that success to employees doing “a magnificent job” of buying into the measures to create a safe work environment.
Even when a worker who had acid reflux vomited on the line, it only resulted in two hours of lost production during the clean up. For a potential COVID event, the company brings in certified third-party cleaners in Tyvek suits to handle the situation according to the proper protocols.
“We made it a goal to not infect anybody at work but if, God forbid, anything happened, we wanted to minimize the potential impact to our employees and to our customers,” Brodie said. “We’ve also spent a lot of time with our employees talking about safe behaviors and what they can co to help contribute to the safe environment.”
Mask empowerment
That includes wearing masks when working close to others. The company provides those masks, including of a variety of styles made by local church groups. Employees are also free to bring their own masks.
“It’s a time where people don’t have a lot of control or a lot of power,” Brodie said. “Letting them choose the mask that fits them and is most comfortable — it gives them a little bit of power back, a little bit of control back.”
For the most part, the masks aren’t the N95 type, so named because they filter out 95 percent of pathogens. Those are still being prioritized for medical workers. “But we need N95s for some of our manufacturing processes such as painting,” Brodie said. “So we are using alternative KN95s.” (The latter are Chinese-made equivalents to N95s).
The company is also coordinating the availability of personal protective equipment across its locations. “If one site’s running low and other sites are in pretty good shape we’ll be able to react very quickly to keep the employees protected,” Brodie said. “And then we communicate best practices across the organization.”
One of the initial challenges was ensuring adequate social space in break rooms, lunchrooms, at the entrance turnstile, and at time clocks. Instead of three shifts, work happens on two shifts with time available between shifts for extensive cleaning and sanitizing if needed. “Then we eliminated our time clocks because we didn’t want people to have to touch those surfaces,” Brodie said. “We shut down the employee entrances and we’re bringing the employees in through overhead doors, like shipping doors, so they can come in and not be in close contact with each other.”
At first, employees had their temperatures taken with contactless thermometers on arrival at work. But with 400 employees that was a logistical nightmare, Brodie said.
Thermal scanners bought
Facial and mask recognition and temperature screening solutions utilizing Real Time Network technology is used at entrances to Reading Truck Group’s corporate office, with plans to roll-out to additional locations.Photo: Reading Truck Group
So the company purchased thermal scanning units with cameras that can cover an area 12 feet wide and 25 feet long. “Any time there’s an issue with an elevated temperature an alarm goes off and an email is generated that goes to the company nurse, our safety manager, and the plant director,” Brodie said.
As one might expect, early on the system generated a few false alarms although those have diminished greatly as the settings have been refined. If the alarm does sound, that employee is rechecked with a contactless thermometer. “So far we’ve had no positives come through for elevated temperature after the recheck,” Brodie said.
As last count, the employee hotline had received 115 calls, resulting in about 55 cases that required managing. The vast majority turned out to be for flulike symptoms and not COVID-19.
So far Reading has spent more than $200,000 in one-time costs on its COVID equipment. Brodie expects that to at least double by this fall. One other technology the company is trying out at its smaller facilities and corporate office is a facial recognition and temperature device about the size of a large cellphone that utilized Real Time Networks technology.
“It’ll verify if they’re wearing a mask, it’ll verify who they are, it’ll verify their temperature, and it’ll give them an all-clear,” Brodie said.
Parent firm on board
Another challenge has been that each state has a different incidence rate for COVID-19 and different regulations. For the most part employees conform to their local regulations, although Reading and its parent company, Houston, Texas-based JB Poindexter & Co. Inc., are taking a more standardized approach.
“In general the employees have taken it very, very seriously and I think they’ve done a pretty good job of policing us, policing each other and trying to make sure that they’re doing the right things (and) they’re not going to cause issues at work,” Brodie said.
Company owner John Poindexter has a weekly call with his company presidents and various vice-presidents to go over the latest guidance from OSHA and the CDC “and also share best practices business unit to business unit,” Brodie said.
“John is very focused on the safety of his employees,” added Brodie, who ended the interview with, “Stay safe and wash your hands.”
— Keith Norbury