Through good and bad times.

Measures to limit the spread of the virus:
Like many businesses, our very first reflex when the pandemic broke out was to focus on the health and safety of our employees: we closed our Print Media Centers and Academies for public access, restricted travels to a minimum, and provided our staff with the tools to enable them to work from home whenever possible. Special protection measures were put in place for employees whose jobs require their physical presence at our production facilities.

Measures to ensure service continuity:
Our next priority was to develop a service continuity plan for our customers. The question we've asked ourselves was: what can our company do to support our customers’ businesses during this crisis? How can we ensure they get the supplies and services they need, when onsite service calls are almost impossible to organize if not plain prohibited? What can we offer customers whose businesses shut down - either because they were required to do so by local authorities or because demand for print jobs simply stopped from one day to another?

Here are some examples of initiatives we have taken to help our customers and communities surmount these challenges*

_{*Disclaimer: These are individual examples. The support Heidelberg is able to provide may vary from country to country and from case to case, based on local regulations and availability of resources.}

So far this year, the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly disruptive for the print media industry.

Not only did it lead to the last-minute postponement of drupa - the most important event of the industry, - it also put thousands of commercial print shops around the world abruptly out of a job, in countries where, during lockdown, they were considered to be non-essential businesses. On the other hand, packaging and label print shops have been put under particular strain, caught between a staggering demand and a dire lack of supplies - in particular, dampening solutions and any prepress or press chemicals based on isopropyl alcohol.

Some of our customers have been particularly creative in finding ways to cope with the situation: here are stories we collected from the field.