The months of April and May brought an unprecedented level of production volume to Crest in a time of year that has historically not been our busiest. Good news…in fact great news. However, with extremely low levels of un- employment in the area, it proved difficult for Crest to quickly add on and train a large amount of new staff on short notice. Consequently, our employees basically rolled up their work sleeves and did whatever was necessary to meet this new level of demand. All areas of Crest were impacted in one way or another. In addition to the obvious of hiring more people, a num- ber of different strategies were explored in helping meet our demand for more production. We tried having man- agers work on line and while all help was appreciated and most welcomed – the managers as a group proved that one simply doesn’t walk into one of these production jobs and hit the ground running and we all came away with a renewed appreciation for the work that was done on the production floor. We also had a team of ex-production workers that were now in different positions at Crest that volunteered to go back to the production line for nearly a month to help provide some relief – they proved to be very proficient and were still quite capable on the line. These combined efforts brought some relief and occasionally some comic relief, but they alone were not the answer to our problem. The bulk of the heavy lifting in meeting our production demand was handled by the employees who were already doing the various jobs required to make product go out the door every day. In the months of April and May Crest employees worked a staggering 12,000 hours of overtime ensuring that we were able to meet the needs of our customers. That’s a lot of tired, sore people who missed quality time at home on the weekends to make this hap- pen. We are grateful for all the extra effort that was put into this and thankful for the group of employees that call Crest their work home. Crest kicked in some extras as our way of saying thank you to those putting in the extra time and certainly we paid a lot of overtime expense that wasn’t covered in our pricing model that ultimately meant that April and May weren’t pretty on the end-of-month statements. However, in the end, we took care of our customers and lived to fight an- other day. For those that like some extra overtime don’t worry, there will certainly be more available in the com- ing months. We remain confident that we’ll make the right decisions that will put us in a position to reasonably handle any volume that comes our way. Taking Care of Business...and Working Overtime by Jeff Meiners Another connection to Crest is Nurse Heidi McGlown. Her son, Dentrell, a junior at DHS, is a starting out-fielder and sometimes a pitcher. When speaking to Heidi her eyes light up and she can’t help but smile at the history Dentrell was a part of at DHS. “Dentrell started playing T-ball when he was four or five. There weren’t any grade school baseball teams so he played through the Al Morrison League in Dixon then the American Legion League. An interesting fact is that Dentrell is the only left handed pitcher on the team. He is also known as one of the fastest runners on the team so he gets put in as a courtesy runner frequently. A courtesy runner is used to swap out a runner on first base or to replace the catcher or pitcher on first base. Recently he was chosen to play in an all-conference game in Rockford later in June. Yes, they were a little disappointed they got 4th at State but still ex- cited that they made it that far. Since he is a junior, he will get to play another year at DHS and plans on playing baseball in college.” Crest Foods would like to congratulate the Dixon Dukes on their accomplishments and especially Payton and Dentrell.
July, August & September 2019 Crest Ink 13
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