Page 17 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 4 - Fall 2020

DS: This is unlike anything that really try to stay out in front of it as much very quickly. And of course, avail our-
as possible.
CF: It impacted every business that we have. We saw this sudden stop of the housing market, but a renais- sance of the R&R — repair and remodel — market, on our wood products side. We saw, you know, a strong ecommerce sector for corrugated packaging, but we also are feeling the slowing economy and the demands for corrugated packaging. And on the consumer side, obviously, we had a big stop in anything that is food service-related and away from home as a lot of people shifted their work and their time spent to a home environment and
therefore a big surge on our consumer side from the at-home sector.
we’ve seen in a long time. When the pandemic really started kicking off in that March/April timeframe, we saw a pretty dramatic drop-off in demand for wood products that lessened the demand for logs as well. We saw a significant drop-off in housing activity in the March, April and early May timeframe as well.
We did take some early actions. We kicked off our crisis management team right away, really to help put safety proto- cols in across our organization. That was a key focus for us. Help our organization and our businesses deal with the bevy of regulations and guidance coming from the safety folks and professionals at the state, federal and local level. We did take some production downtime at the early stages of the pandemic to really kind of keep our inventory levels in check, given what was going on in the broader market. Certainly a lot of communication really across the supply chain from contrac- tors, suppliers, employees, customers, really just trying to stay on top
of the entire supply chain and manage issues
as they arose
and
DEVIN STOCKFISH
President and CEO
Weyerhaeuser
selves of technology and all that, but that is not really at a leadership level. We had to come together in different ways, com- municating, making decisions, and also knowing what we were actually going to focus on.
Second, more than ever, really, we needed to rely [on] and enable our employees in the factories, in the markets, working from home, to make decisions faster, better,
o o n n t t h he ei i r r o o w w n n . . And last but
n no o t t l le e a a s s t t , , we
First, we needed to learn how to work differently
very,
CHRISTIAN FISCHER
President and CEO
Georgia-Pacific
STEVE VOORHEES
CEO
WestRock
MILES ROBERTS
Executive Director and Group Chief Executive
DS Smith
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