Centurion Safety Products Ltd.

This year Centurion are regional shortlisted in the Manufacturing Matters #ManufacturingHeroes award.

Here at Centurion, during the COVID-19 outbreak, we have been able to demonstrate our resilience as a business and we are proud to be able to directly support the fight against the Coronavirus and protect those, that protect all of us. With many businesses facing threats to survival, many UK manufacturers adapted operations to continue supporting employees and serving customers and others transformed their business to support the fight against the coronavirus by using their skills, innovation, technologies, and engineering expertise.

For our production team, the shape of our business changed overnight. Within days we had to come to terms with implementing a social distancing program to allow over 90 people to turn up to site every day to manufacture products destined for, among others, the NHS and MOD. We remapped the factory to allow for 2 metre distancing, introduced temperature checks upon arrival, removed or held open doors, marked out distancing on floors, changed break time rotations, introduced 2 hourly clean downs of all common/shared touch points, such as door handles, vending machines, computers, mice and keyboards. Shift change times were altered to allow for departure before arrival to avoid cross shift contamination risk, and all workstations were cleaned thoroughly during the changeover period. We introduced a COVID- 19 risk assessment and an action plan for the unplanned event of a COVID- 19 cases within the workforce. We have worked very hard to reassure our staff that their safety is at the forefront of everything we do, to enable them to carry on supplying front line workers with confidence. We underpin all that we do with our unrivalled commitment to education and training – building the wearer knowledge and behaviours that, we believe, are central to safe working environments.

Our technical training expert Chris Tidy recalls:
‘I remember the day quite well when I was told to work from home for the foreseeable future, that was the day COVID- 19 had really started to tighten its stranglehold on society. I am used to working out on the road and travelling globally for exhibitions and meetings and now I was going to be stuck at home! Centurion quickly adapted with I.T at the hub, shifting people from office locations to home locations very quickly. I am the Technical and Training Specialist and could not envisage how much over the next few months I would be thrust into the digital world. We had to quickly adapt setting up training over Teams for our partners. Technical support for our NHS partners was crucial and this was conducted via conference calls, email and telephone.’
We set up a Technical Support email address and updated our web site with key advice on our product recommendations to protect during the COVID- 19 outbreak and the importance of cleaning and decontaminating of our products. We produced a detailed cleaning guide and shot a series of videos at home to help support wearers of PPE, all made available via social media platforms, our website and YouTube to our users.

Centurion, as a team, made an early start on preparing for the impact of COVID-19, with a dedicated cross functional team set up in early March to ensure that the Health and Safety of our workers was priority. The transition for office staff from working in the office to working from home was planned in advance to cause as little disruption as possible for all staff. Integrating Microsoft Teams for all our office staff ensured that our Customer Experience and Global Sales teams were able to continue supporting our customers seamlessly.

During this time and for the foreseeable future Centurion is committed to supplying critical PPE in the fight against COVID- 19 globally, and to offer expert guidance on the safe and sustainable return to the workplace.