CHALLENGE
what’s happened over
the last few weeks is a
fantastic thing for industry
to have done. It has an
“engineering’s finest hour”
feeling about it
19 June 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk
were prepared to take some personal risk and
prepared to take a bit of a corporate risk,” he
said. “People were prepared to step up into
slightly unknown territory and that formed the
initial core of the enterprise.”
Over the following days, the wider
consortium began to take shape as Elsy and the
group assessed offers of help from across
industry and assembled a team with the right
blend of expertise: “We were selective about who
was involved,” he said. “The entry criteria were
that this wasn’t just about being a passenger. It
was all in!”
Very quickly, a palpable sense of shared
purpose kicked in. “There was no corporate
posturing,” said Elsy. “There was a definite
sense, because this was a national emergency,
that the responsibility was quite heavy on our
shoulders and that we were all in this together.”
In the wake of the government’s call a wide
range of groups proposed an almost dizzying
array of competing ventilator designs, but Elsy’s
consortium quickly decided that rather than
starting from scratch, the most sensible way to
rapidly meet the demand was to scale up
production of existing systems: specifically the
portable paraPac ventilator manufactured by
Luton’s Smiths Group and the Prima ESO2, a
ventilator design adapted from anaesthesia
equipment produced by Oxfordshire firm
Penlon.
What followed next was an unprecedented
ramp-up. Existing production facilities operated
by Smiths and Penlon were scaled up; seven
entirely new manufacturing and test facilities
were established at sites operated by Ford,
Airbus, STI, GKN, Rolls Royce and Mclaren;
parallel supply chains were established to
source millions of components from around the
world; project teams and logistics frameworks
were put in place; and around 3000 individuals
were trained up to carry out assembly and test
of this critical life-saving equipment.
In normal circumstances Penlon and Smiths
have combined capacity for between 50 and 60
devices per week. As of May 20th, well over 1000
units had already been delivered to hospitals
around the UK and the consortium was on track
to hit production targets of 1500 units per week.
Under any circumstances this would be
impressive but what really stands out is the
speed of the response. And whilst being
unshackled from normal business constraints
has clearly helped keep things rattling along, the
main factor, said Elsy, has been the pragmatic,
no-nonsense spirit of the people and
organisations involved. “They are engineers….
people used to putting wings on aircraft, firing
cars into production and racing cars on the
track. Very pragmatic people.”
Having some of the leading F1 teams on
board has also helped in this regard. “We
grabbed the opportunity of moving at the pace
the F1 guys would move at,” said Elsy. “They
lifted our spirits of doing things quickly and
applying large amounts of top-quality
intellectual horsepower to problems. It created
an incredible sense of pace with substance
behind it. We were able to achieve an enormous
amount in a very short space of time which
became infectious and self-fueled the process.”
At the time of writing the consortium
remained focused on the task of ramping up
ventilator production, but Elsy is determined
that the lessons learned from the initiative
aren’t lost when we finally begin to move beyond
the current crisis and assess the future
priorities of the UK manufacturing sector. “It’s
all of our responsibilities within the consortium
to use what we’ve learned to good effect, and the
consortium is keen that we don’t lose the story
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