Customer centricity at Covestro Elastomers

The coronavirus pandemic is an exceptional situation. In this time of unprecedented global disruption, Covestro Elastomers is doing everything in its power to protect its employees and the health of the public, while continuing to support its customers around the world by striving to be a reliable supplier during this crisis. Since its beginning, Covestro has implemented a number of measures to adapt to the local situation and maintain its activities.

The manufacturing sites at Covestro´s elastomers business continued to operate thanks to shift work organization, while the office employees worked remotely in home offices in accordance with local mandates and recommendations. Despite the situation, the company has been striving to advance its developments, to pursue its production, to deliver its goods and to provide its customers the support they required.

Driving developments forward

Innovation at Covestro cannot be limited in crisis times. It is quite the opposite: the company needs to unleash the full creative potential of its diverse research workforces to prepare a bright future once the crisis will be over. For that purpose, Covestro Elastomers has reorganized the work in the lab to enable all colleagues to advance their developments.

“Despite the challenge, we have had the opportunity to come up with innovative ideas,” explains Aurélie Perrenot, Head of R&D at Covestro Elastomers. “For example, our team has deepened its knowledge through a more thorough review of the literature and has made great strides in the development of the next generation of our solutions for the interface between our elastomers and other materials."

Pursuing production, delivering goods

Running a production implies being properly supplied with the goods needed to manufacture products. This applies to Covestro Elastomers and, moreover, to its customers. In order to enable the safe and continuous production of its chemicals, the company has implemented shift work. Furthermore, it secured all its shipments with trusted carrier companies.

“In spite of the difficulties,” illustrates Dr. Gaelle Baquey, Production and Technology at Covestro Elastomers, “we were, for instance, able to produce with short notice our hybrid system Desmodur^® MTX6076 and organize the shipment of a full container to Australia.” This secured delivery allowed the customer to produce screening medias for the mining industry, known for its high requirement to maximize the availability of mining equipment.

Providing support

The most important factor for Covestro Elastomers’ customers’ daily activities is to keep their production going. Unexpected interruptions can have serious consequences. However, even emergencies can be addressed remotely. The Baulé^® Easy Assist service has been designed to make that complex task much easier. It allows remote access to the machine via a secure connection – so the technicians can monitor, diagnose and provide remote assistance for maximum speed and convenience.

“Combined with our Baulé^® Easy Parts service, which enables to identify and order required spare parts in real time, our customers benefit from an efficient support wherever and whenever required,” says Romain Petit, Machines After Sales Manager at Covestro Elastomers. “These services have been very powerful over this crisis: they have allowed for instance to check a machine in Brazil, ship the parts to fix a defective clack valve and assist its replacement thanks to digital communication tool. As crucial as it is, our customer support service also managed to remotely organize a four days training for the setting of a machine just delivered to Italy.”