In January 2020, we started hearing about a new health threat that would present genuine concerns to citizens. As January turned into February, we were hearing terms like Corona Virus, COVID-19, and even pandemic. By March, the writing was on the wall, and whatever it was, it was having a powerful impact globally, and no one knew where it was all leading. By April, we heard from one of our concerned clients and they asked us if we could work with them on designing and producing prototypes that would allow them to get their employees back to their workstations in the logistics sector. We agreed to assist and thus was the birth of our HEALTHY BARRIERS solutions for manufacturing and warehousing.
From the start, we decided that our approach to the problem would be to produce sturdy, “industrial-grade” devices that could be easily deployed once shipped to end-users, dismantled and stored when the threat passes, and, most importantly, could be re-deployed if and when another threat surfaces.
Fitting Barriers into the MTAC Mission
This was a big ask for a group like MTAC who has built our reputation as a top-shelf industrial infrastructure installation and facility maintenance services group, but we set out to accomplish this new set of goals like we have all the rest. Our determination to provide fresh solutions in a timely manner to clients who recognize and appreciate quality and integrity
was our fuel. Within 48 hours of the first phone call, we had delivered 3 prototypes to a local building for our first client whom we had been serving for years. That work was quickly followed by another set of different devices for use in different situations. All of them were designed and developed with those guiding principles. One thing led to another, and suddenly we found ourselves manufacturing thousands of HEALTHY BARRIERS for that client and we were shipping them to their facilities across the United States.
By the end of October 2020, we completed our commitments to our first Healthy Barriers client. As we paused to catch our breath, the phone rang, and it was another one of our clients. They asked us to assist them in creating healthy barriers to aid their efforts to increase attendance because many employees were calling off work. We invited them to take a closer look at the designs we produced. They said they liked what they saw but needed our product to be larger. We went back to the drawing board and determined ways to successfully expand our early program to incorporate larger versions of the already proven designs. We produced them for that group and they appreciated our prompt replies to their requests.
Growing Our Offerings
In November, another of our clients asked us to help them get ready to increase their employee headcount in time for the upcoming and fast approaching 2020 holiday season. Being an e-commerce group, they need to “staff-up” each year and asked this winter for our help to create the necessary social distancing devices to allow them to have more employees for the upcoming push. We started with their break room tables and have since moved on to extend their office cubicles, their restroom partitions, and we even engineered solutions for their multi-bowl bathroom sinks. All of this is being designed and developed with the same ease of installation and dismantling/re-deployment goals that we started with. The systems we have created all meet these basic standards and our clients love them!
Safety is Our Top Priority
Recently, while deploying a set of our office cubicle Healthy Barriers, I was thinking about how the placement of these devices can have an effect on our current situation. As with any threat, there are a few basic things one can do to protect oneself from a threat, whether it is from radiation, a wild animal, or in this case a health threat.
TDS!
Time, Distance, and Shielding have long been recognized as the first line of defense when facing most threats.
- Decrease the amount of time you are exposed to the threat
- Increase the distance between yourself and the threat
- Whenever possible, place a barrier or shield between you and the threat
That is what our HEALTHY BARRIERS are all about. We can literally increase the distance between you and the threat and provide the necessary shield between you and the threat by simply deploying a layer of plastic in the gap. Our barrier surfaces are made of sturdy polycarbonate LEXAN or of flexible 20-gauge clear vinyl. Each has its own applications and respective advantages. Both are easily cleaned with simple soap and water.
If we can place these barriers in some key locations throughout our work environments, we can help reduce the risks our employees are facing and thereby increase confidence, attendance, and even accelerate to the day when we can take off our masks at work and get back to business. I know whenever I talk with employees at facilities using our Healthy Barriers, they are belly-aching about wearing masks for endless hours. Everyone will work around the barriers, (they get it- they are there for everyone’s protection.) But masks are another matter. They are often uncomfortable and difficult to work in, especially if your job has any cardio impact to it.
I heard a guy call in to a talk radio show the other day. He is a drywall contractor. He uses filtered respirators when he is working with drywall. (These devices are a far cry better than the masks we are all wearing.) He explained that when he is sanding out the drywall to “finish” the joints, he can still smell and taste the particles of drywall dust through his filtered respirator mask. If that is true, then it stands to reason that the masks we are all wearing are doing even less to protect us from the microbial coronavirus which we are all trying to stay away from. The virus is a microbe and the masks can only mitigate the threat so much. Beyond that, we are all taking daily risks by simply breathing in working environments. That is why we are working daily to produce these barriers for a variety of applications in a variety of work environments. Our hope is that sooner or later-if we can get enough of these barriers stood or suspended- that we can actually start to see the need for these masks decrease.
We appreciate you taking the time to take a closer look at what we have been developing for the past year and we invite you to contact us to see how we can assist you in your efforts to create a safer work environment.