To Our valued business partners

As you are well aware the logistics industry is experiencing significant impacts from the COVID-19 virus. These impacts are set to continue for an as yet undefined time frame.

ACUG has spent the last few days in consultation with our management teams and advisors to put together our contingency plans to ensure service quality and continuity throughout this period.

Due to our unique business structure ACUG is able to operate in the same fashion, moving forward with minimal impact too our quality and service.
ACUG operates under our “area management” business system which we have had in place for some time now. How this works is that each capital city in Australia is divided up into 3 or 4 geographic areas (depending on the size of the city). These geographic areas each have a dedicated Area Manager that is responsible for their specific area. These area managers do not have any need to come to our recruitment and admin centers in each state.

This means we are able to keep our area managers physically separated from each other so that if one of us becomes infected with COVID-19 we are not all forced to go into self-isolation.

Due to the very large number of sites that ACUG services in each capital city we are able to always ensure that the majority of our container unloading staff are not in contact with each other. This ensures we have enough staff to cover work for staff that are forced into self-isolation.

Other things we have in place to ensure service continuity and the safety of our staff and customers are as follows:

1.  No physical interaction between management team members ensuring redundancy.
2.  No travel to sites unless for specific service related requirements
3.  All management staff are able to work from home.
4.  ACUG has a fully paperless operating system which improves our ability to limit physical interaction between staff and customers
5.  ACUG office is equipped with sanitization products
6.  Recruitment and induction process is being handled remotely with the ACUG online induction being completed by new staff from home to avoid them having to come into the office.
7.  All casual staff being restricted to operating within their area manager’s area.
8.  All container unloading staff being kept working together with the same crew members where possible to limit the chance of cross infection between crews
9.  Reviewed unloading procedures enabling us to maintain a minimum of 1.5M between unloading crew members.
10.  Policy in place to avoid physical contact.
11.  All casual staff tool boxed on using correct hand washing and sanitization procedures.
12.  Larger sites with regular work will have hand sanitizer placed in the unloading areas.
13.  All casual staff will be reviewed and any who have returned from overseas recently will not be sent out to sites.
14.  Constant monitoring of the health of all staff through toolbox meetings and communications.
15.  Extra staff are being recruited at all times to ensure we always have a surplus of available workers.
It is vital that we work to ensure our staff and customers are protected as much as humanly possible.

Our staff are, in the main, casual employees so their priority is to defend themselves against the possibility of being infected. If they are forced into a two week “self-isolation” period it will be very hard for them to survive financially so ACUG is doing everything we possibly can to educate and protect them.

ACUG senior management are monitoring this situation daily and we will make sure that any information that is important to our customers is delivered immediately.

We will send detail our official contingency plan in the next document, if you require any further information please don’t hesitate wto contact us.
Take care, be aware and maintain good hygiene.

Andrew Pearce
ACUG