PerkinElmer Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Response Plan


March 23, 2020

Dear Valued Stakeholder,

PerkinElmer is committed to ensuring the health and safety of our employees and their families, customers, and partners as the world manages through this unfortunate situation. I wanted to take the opportunity to outline our current approach to conducting safe and responsible business, including protecting employees at both PerkinElmer and customer sites, protecting customers when we visit them or host them for training, and managing our supply chain and product delivery.

Across all regions, PerkinElmer’s management teams are closely monitoring local and national developments and new regulations and guidelines daily. We will update our response plan as appropriate.

Customer Interactions: Service and Training

PerkinElmer is taking a thoughtful approach to managing customer interactions on a regional basis around the globe. With few exceptions, PerkinElmer has canceled all face-to-face upcoming trainings at our learning centers until the end of March. We are implementing virtual training where possible. The Commercial Learning Experience Team is closely monitoring the situation on a regional basis and will refine its strategy for future training sessions. Customers should contact their sales representative about any particular upcoming training.

For PerkinElmer’s service operations, each region is following local and national guidelines around travel and hygiene to determine the impact, if any, on PerkinElmer service employees visiting customer sites.

At PerkinElmer sites, we may ask visitors to sign-in with information on their recent travel history, potential exposure risks and current wellbeing. Our sites will follow local and national laws and regulations when asking for visitor information, and likewise, PerkinElmer employees will comply with customers’ visitation policies.

Supply Chain and Product Delivery

As of the date of this letter, PerkinElmer has enough inventory on hand to fill most customer needs. However, in certain cases, we might experience a delay of a few days to a few weeks. Fortunately, we started very early in conducting a series of actions with suppliers, our manufacturing sites, and transportation companies to ensure we can most effectively produce and deliver reagents, consumables, spare parts and new instruments for our customers. As our solutions that are being used to address the COVID-19 virus may be in high demand, we will work to best allocate those products across all locations and customers to maintain product continuity.

Specifically, with regards to suppliers, we have contacted all suppliers that were either located in China or that have dependencies on China. All suppliers are already back to work and have restarted shipments. Now, our attention has expanded to the rest of the world. Even if in most countries, there is no supplier shutdown, the situation may evolve, and therefore, our procurement and sourcing teams are in constant contact with all suppliers to detect any capacity decrease or potential shutdown. We are also increasing our inventory to face next month’s uncertainties.

Currently, no PerkinElmer factory is stopped due to COVID-19. In addition, across PerkinElmer’s factories and warehouses, we are operating in accordance with each country’s regulations, including adapting the working conditions, while keeping continuity of our deliveries.

From a logistics standpoint, we are in regular contact with transportation companies to assess the situation and find solutions to secure our shipments and minimize the delay to our customers. As several passenger flights cross-continent are cancelled, we are negotiating and executing charter flights and moving from standard to priority shipment to ensure that goods are not delayed beyond three days.

Finally, all call centers are working to respond to any request as usual. With that said, if you have other specific questions, please call your PerkinElmer sales representative or your normal customer care number.

Employees: Travel and Hygiene

PerkinElmer has effectively eliminated foreign travel and reduced domestic travel to a bare minimum. In addition, out of precaution due to the high concentration of people at a number of our manufacturing and R&D sites, we have prohibited outside employee access to these sites until further notice. We are also requiring many employees around the globe to use smart technologies to work from home, only allowing entry to our sites to limited authorized, essential personnel. We are taking a regional and country approach to managing travel within and across borders, based on airline and government guidelines. All of our teams have been asked to revisit the need for any in-person internal meetings across sites and/or countries that have been planned until further notice. Wherever possible, in-person meetings are being rearranged as virtual sessions. Our managers consider the safety of our employees as the top priority over business activities.

For employees who have a history of traveling and living in an area affected by COVID-19, they will be asked to follow the national guidance on precautionary self-quarantining, as well as any local workplace policies. If an employee is exhibiting any signs or symptoms of the flu or common cold, we ask them to stay home and inform HR and their manager. Additionally, we support practicing good hygiene, including asking employees to wash hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, avoid touching eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands, and covering coughs or sneezes with a tissue and then disposing of it. We follow the latest guidelines issued by the World Health Organization, as well as local and regional governmental guidance.

At all our facilities, we are increasing the frequency in which we disinfect offices, restaurants, laboratories, production facilities and public facilities, as well as maintaining good ventilation. Additionally, we are supplying antibacterial hand gel wherever we can.

While these are certainly challenging times, please know that PerkinElmer is taking action to prioritize the wellbeing of our colleagues and all those we interact with around the world.

Regards,

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Prahlad Singh
President & Chief Executive Officer, PerkinElmer Inc.