“The project had kicked off before the country went into lockdown,” said Vernon Mathias of Velvin Paper Products. But once the lockdown was announced, all activities came to a standstill. 

Manufacturing operations at Velvin had to be temporarily shut down until further notice, as per government instruction. “A sudden lockdown had created a panicking situation, with many ensuring enough food supplies in their homes for an uncertain future,” said Mathias.

Over the next few days, government allowed specific industries to operate under the category of essential services, edible oil being one among the list. Velvin’s customer resumed operations and reached out to the company for the packaging material. 

The company received necessary permission for re-starting manufacturing, but the challenges were not over. “Our supplies of inward and outward movements were completely disrupted. Sourcing of raw material was additional challenge as many of them were still shut. The demand for essential grew five time the regular demand of packaging due to panic buying,” explained Mathias. “We had to bring our workforce into confidence, with their health and safety at work location including their safe transportation.”

Velvin has a workforce which understood the severity of the situation and geared up to work for the larger interest of the society. Next the company activated its vendors one after the other to support its project, by supplying the raw material that would enable it to produce corrugated cartons. “Even after activating our vendors, arranging inward and outward movement of material was a challenge as availability of transportation was selectively available and at a huge cost,” said Mathias.

Individually, none of these issues would be crippling, but taken together it had the potential to keep manufacturing off the course. “We found out a way. We aligned six out of our 24 vehicles for inward and outward movement of material in an optimal way. In order to optimise freight cost, we gradually activated vendors in the same region as our customer location for round trips,” explained Mathias.

The lockdown was announced on 24 March 2020, factory operation commenced on 2 April 2020, despatch commenced on 4 April 2020. Velvin supplied 8.25-million retail packs in the month of April 2020. 

Some packaging companies, while meeting the Covid-19 challenges, discovered strength they never knew they had. Like Art-O-Print, Velvin too removed the barriers quickly and found ways to say, “Yes, we can do that”.