Production for “Critical” Infrastructure Including Educational Facilities Resumes

April 3, 2020

To our Valued Distribution Partners and Field Sales Team,

We would like to provide you a quick update on our return to production and provide additional clarity to a question that has been brought to our attention regarding production in support of our educational infrastructure.

Early this week we shared with you all our rationale and decision to return a limited workforce to our Decatur and Benton Harbor production facilities. Our decision to resume production was a result of further guidance and clarity provided by the Governor’s order and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”), under the Department of Homeland Security and its definition of “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers”. 

In our previous communication we highlighted several critical infrastructure industries as outlined in the CISA guidance, which was developed to ensure the resilience of our communities and our nation as we combat this COVID-19 virus. Our list did not provide enough specificity on the very important education infrastructure. This is well-defined under “Other Community-Or Government-based operations and essential functions”, with specific guidance on both public and private education, as well as the workers and facilities that ensure continuity. We highly recommend that our customers, partners, stakeholders, and associates review the most current version of this document (version 2), which can be found at CISA.GOV.

Special-Lite is a leading manufacturer of high-performance specialty building entry and security products for these very demanding and secure facility requirements. We are proud of our long history of serving the educational community and will continue to maintain our commitment to this essential infrastructure during this crisis.

Finally, we are pleased to share that a committed team of production associates have returned to our Michigan facilities and have resumed production and shipments. Our sales and production teams have worked quickly in establishing a process to review those projects that meet the definition of essential and or critical infrastructure. We will evaluate and schedule production as follows;

1. Emergency orders requiring immediate production in support of our nation’s mobilization effort
   1. i.e. special projects that immediately support the mobilization of our country’s life-saving work for field hospitals or modular facilities
2. Essential and critical infrastructure workers and projects
   1. i.e. wastewater treatment plants, schools, data centers, etc.
3. All other projects
   1. i.e. aquariums, amusement parks, etc.

We will discuss with you these projects and projected lead-time requirements based on current national stay-at-home guidance.

Your help and support are greatly appreciated as we do our part to maintain our countries critical infrastructure. We will continue to reach out to you as we work to develop our production priority list.

Please continue to review current orders that you have with Special-Lite and determine those that you feel fit the description and have a critical install date. Again, our sales team remains in full operation while working remotely, and are ready to answer any question, provide estimates or answer your questions.

Thanks for your understanding and support.

Very Sincerely,