Last month, VP of Operations, Greg Groleau, met with leaders from our main equipment manufacturers. They discussed major areas of concern in preparation for year-end such as part supply, equipment downtime, and planning for future maintenance of all equipment.
We are beginning to see significant improvement with Canon Equipment uptime in both Fort Worth and in Arden Hills. Over the past two weeks, we have received one third the number of downtime reports compared to multiple periods of previous reports, and the few one-off instances that did occur were not of the length or severity we had seen previously.
Significant progress has been made in building up our parts supply closer to our facilities to minimize downtime when there is a problem. We are seeing the beginning of positive progress, but the problem is not yet solved. We will continue tracking this closely and engaging in communications multiple times per week with Canon leadership to ensure we stay on track.
Overall, BlueCrest has done well keeping our equipment up, but over the past week we have seen a spike in downtime. VP of Operations, Greg Groleau, met with Tim Rodriquez, SVP of National Service, and Jeff Dalmann, VP of Service, to discuss their service to all Venture Solutions facilities. They committed to full engagement in keeping all equipment up, including the Bell and Howell and the finishing equipment they are responsible for.
We will be meeting with BlueCrest and Bell and Howell to better quantify and prioritize how we deal with the lack of parts availability for some of the equipment. Together, we will determine what is fully serviceable, serviceable but with potential extended downtime due to parts supply constraints, and what equipment needs to be retired and broken apart for parts.
Greg Groleau also planned to meet with Kern to address some of the issues we have seen in both Arden Hills and Fort Worth. We expect to have details of further developments in this partnership available to share soon.
The Venture Solutions Operations team is fully engaged with our equipment partners to solve these issues and intends to be fully prepared come January 1st or sooner. All Production Managers are up to date on all equipment, and we continue to monitor critical components on a monthly basis.
