The purpose of this letter is to provide you with information regarding consumable supply.
Ahead of our annual price increase, we received exceptional orders for consumables. Under normal circumstances, we would be able to fulfill a spike in demand with little disruption to you. We take our commitment to providing consistent consumable supply very seriously, and we have built resilience into our supply chain and manufacturing systems to serve this purpose. However, we also experienced global supply disruptions on a few key input materials that constrained our production output. The combination of unusually high demand and constrained supply due to pandemic-related disruptions have resulted in unacceptable service to you.
We have taken several actions to rectify this situation, including sourcing additional materials, adding resources, instituting weekend shifts, and acquiring additional capital equipment. These actions have increased our weekly output by 60% over the prior few weeks. We will maintain these gains and increase output further over the coming months.
We established an escalation process to allocate constrained supply to fill critical customer needs. Please help us by ensuring your Hypertherm representative is notified of critical customer needs and by planning appropriately for extended lead times.
We are taking every measure to return as quickly as possible to the service you expect from us.
Sincerely,
Jim Miller
Executive Vice President, Plasma, Operations