Action Construction Equipment: Sorab Agarwal, Executive Director
We have been establishing transformative processes such as technological innovations and digitalization in our products.
We have used the time of lockdown to adopt a digital-first approach for the skill development of our employees. We conducted extensive sales training to further equip our sales teams, besides undertaking detailed reviews to realign our business with the changing economic and social environment.
Our robust R&D has enabled us to develop value-for-money products, which are also operator-friendly. Telematics in our machines enables equipment owners to remotely monitor and supervise the various functional parameters of their machines and be up-to-date on their wear and tear.
We have set up telephonic service facilities whereby our engineers have been offering remote support to customers via video or voice calls and also undertaking rectifications and maintenance at our plants by our central service teams.
It is true that due to labour restrictions on project sites and their reduced availability, contractors’ dependency on equipment has become quite high; they are looking for more high-tech equipment and also 24x7 after-sales support and services, including spare parts supply.
We have been working consistently towards mitigating the issue of downtime as it is critical to keep the services running, without unnecessary exposure to the Covid-19 virus. Through our telephonic service facilities, our engineers have been offering remote support to customers, and our central team has also followed the same procedure for undertaking rectifications and maintenance at our manufacturing plants.
As per the state’s laws on restrictions on movements, we have been very flexible in sending our engineers to sites where more serious issues had to be dealt with. As for spare parts, our dealers and stockists have been giving all the support in compliance with the state laws, to tide over these tough times.
Machines come with a high capital investment and in times like these, contractors are facing a liquidity crunch. As a part of our partnership endeavour, we have been offering refurbishment and redoing of machines through our dealers. Also, since a sizeable part of our business is through retail customers, we see some amount of renting to contractors, there too.
It will be a wait and watch situation as of now.
The second wave of Covid-19 certainly disrupted the momentum of the March quarter. April and May of the new financial year saw a large part of the country under lockdown. Also, with the 2nd wave we are seeing stress in the rural economy which was the saviour post the 1st wave. We feel that the Central Government’s impetus on infrastructure development will lead to speedy recovery for the balance part of FY 2021-22.
ACE is an employee-centric and socially responsible organization.
The pandemic has brought about a paradigm shift in life; the entire business ecosystem has been grappling with multiple issues related to employee well-being, arrested demand, production rollbacks, supply-chain, logistical disruptions, and more.
At ACE, our aim is to create a safe place to work while ensuring productivity. When the pandemic situation began to worsen at the beginning of 2020, we shifted our focus on establishing business continuity plans. We started operating in line with workplace sanitization and social distancing norms, while ensuring increased efficiency in teams working remotely, and maintaining 50% or less onsite strength.
Post lockdown, our focus now is on ensuring complete safety of our workforce. To that end, besides putting the safety protocols in place, we have organized vaccination camps at our plant locations with free vaccination of all our employees including the workers.
During the throes of the second wave, we have extended the best possible support to our employees in terms of assistance with hospital beds, availability of oxygen and plasma, and financial support to them and their families.
NBM&CW July 2021
