Texas Power Outages Causing Disruptions in Supply Chain
Recent weather conditions experienced in Texas (and the resulting shutdown of their power grid) have caused an involuntary unplanned shutdown of our primary raw material supplier. Our supplier (and every single manufacturer of polyurethane systems as well as the upstream refineries that supply the raw materials) has declared Force Majeure and temporarily halted operations in order to make repairs to their infrastructure. The scope and scale of this situation is unprecedented in that nearly 25% of total U.S. chemical capacity is either completely offline or running at significantly reduced rates. As a result of these disruptions, we were notified at the end of last week that our raw material supply is going to be significantly reduced for the foreseeable future, which is going to have an immediate effect on our production lead time for both existing and new orders. We realize that this will have a significant impact on both us and our customers. The attached sheet provides additional information/feedback on our current situation and how we can best work together to minimize the impact of this unfortunate situation. We are in constant contact with our supplier as they continually assess their ability to get back to full production and will keep you informed as information changes and updates are available. Most importantly, we are asking all of our customers for patience as we get through this unfortunate event.
To assist during this unprecidented event, we have been asked to take the following measures:
- Please place orders only for parts that are required for an immediate project and hold any “stocking orders” at this time until further notice. We do keep “customer specific” inventory for some customers/items and those items can be ordered/supplied until we run out of stock.
- In-Stock items (marked as such) are still available and we can ship those with our normal 24 hour lead time as long as we have pieces on the shelf. Again, we request that customers order the bare minimum that is needed.
- Production of our stock items has been temporarily suspended to preserve what material we have for custom pieces/orders.
- Once the stock inventory is depleted, those items will be treated and produced as custom orders based on material availability.
- Focus is being placed on the oldest orders with priority to get those orders finished and shipped as soon as possible. Our production department is prioritizing those orders daily in order to minimize the effects this material interruption may have on existing orders, but it may not be possible to finish all of them before we run out of material.
- Rush orders are no longer available until further notice.
- Lead Times:
- We are expecting to have significant material shortages in the 2nd half of March and possibly into early April and the current delivery information that we have from our material supplier is very limited (they are still trying to get their facility fully operational). Therefore, lead time estimates for now are:
- Stock Items – We can ship immediately if we have pieces on the shelf but if we do not have stock, the lead time will be approximately 4 weeks starting from March 8th.
- Custom Items – 4-6 weeks (depending on material availability)
- New lead times are subject to change based on updates and feedback from our suppliers.
Our promise and commitment to all of our customers is that we will do everything in our power to return our service and lead times back to what we, and all of our customers, have come to expect. Please feel free to contact us directly if any additional information is required.
Thank you for your patience and continued patronage during this difficult time.