Insights from the UK’s Ventilator Challenge driving supply change change

Adaptive and agile supply chains have characterised the mass-production of ventilators to meet the spike in demand due to COVID-19. A recent online event that explored what this could mean for future flexible supply chains.

‘The need to improve the resilience of our supply chains has long been recognised as an important goal for a number of reasons, but the pandemic has thrown spotlight on this, showing just how precarious the situation can be,’ shared Ben Sheridan, Digital Manufacturing Lead at the British Standards Institution (BSI). Introducing the recent webinar, ‘Cross-sector supply chain collaboration – building on the ventilator challenge’, by BSI and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVM Catapult), Sheridan highlighted how the Ventilator Challenge in the UK has shown that it is possible to rapidly produce very precise and highly regulated products by collaborating and deploying the manufacturing capacity of different sectors.

Dick Elsy, CEO of HVM Catapult, described how the organisation approached the challenge by supporting existing ventilator manufacturers to scale up production.

It got behind Penlon, a manufacturer of anaesthesia equipment in Abingdon, UK. Once they decided it was scalable, a consortium was developed, including professionals from Airbus, Siemens and McLaren. The challenge was to scale-up Penlon’s original average of two devices per day to 400.

To achieve this scale for the complex medical design, several different items for the output had to be produced simultaneously, which meant having to implement parallel supply chains. These required producing several items with multiple suppliers.

Ramping up production
The production process included three major assembly factories set up by Airbus, Ford and McLaren. Airbus in Broughton, Chester, UK, was the fi rst sub-assembly point, consisting of the absorber and flow meter. Elsy noted that Airbus had set up around 570 workers on five shifts. ‘We built the factory using 3D digital models of the classic digital twin, checking that the factory and process system worked and was COVID friendly, and the factories were built in four weeks,’ he said.

Ford conducted the ventilator sub-assembly, bringing on 700 people across 190 workstations, all of which were multi-shifting. McLaren set up a production facility to make the trolley unit, producing 250 trolleys a day out of the working site.

‘All that then came together in Surface Technologies International (STI) that basically did the final assembly of the units and then passed onto Penlon, [where] we stripped all of their manufacturing facility out to become a final test [point] with some additional support from GKN.’

Elsy said, ‘We had 301 deviations away from the specifi cation, those had to be resolved very quickly. We had to introduce a lot of engineering tweaks into the process to get capability. The approval time, which normally takes about six to nine months, was squeezed into three weeks, which is quite extraordinary.’

The maximum approval time per deviation was, on average, three and a half days. ‘When we were really in the high-volume pace where, you know, seconds counted, we were…turning these around with full authority within 24 hours.’

A digital approach
Sam Turner, HVM’s Chief Technology Officer, was responsible for setting up assembly sites for some of the aero fi rms HVM was working with, and rapidly trying to source large volumes of supply chain components.

Turner noted the interoperability standards considerations – enabling the operational processes, underlying exchange and sharing of information between diff erent systems – and how they used software to develop 3D models of the Penlon devices to scale up the product. ‘There’s a really important role for digital technology in supporting the constraints we have, not just in terms of COVID-19 constraints, but also the limited number of experts available in a relatively small-scale normal production environment,’ Turner explained.

The team implemented Microsoft HoloLens devices – a holographic headset that uses augmented reality to remotely train and teach staff virtually. ‘We managed to train remotely, then also scale the training through the assembly sites and put in place the approval checks, workstations, test boxes, to really ramp up to deliver 10 times more volume, delivering units that would have taken years to produce at the pace of a couple of months,’ Turner added.

Upskilling
It was a challenge to upskill the workers at speed to meet the demand. Rob Scott, Head of Digital at the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), observed that

‘So much of the expertise these days is implicit, not explicit. But we had to turn that round, we had to use digital platforms to be able to expose that knowledge so that we could upskill these workers.

‘We were upskilling people one week that were putting together car engines for the Ford Focus or looking at wing assemblies for Airbus planes. And the next week, they would be putting together ventilators for people whose lives depended on it.’

An expert would capture the work conducted by wearing a HoloLens device to record what they were doing. They would then take that recording offline and author it by putting in other digital content and assets and then develop 3D models overnight.

‘We couldn’t have done this without having a digital platform that we could communicate through,’ Scott added. ‘This enabled the production of holographic work  instructions, and also gave the ability  to communicate with a remote expert.

‘The expert could actually look through the eyes of the operator remotely and be able to advise and inform them on what the next step was,’ Scott said. ‘So, we’ve got general work instructions that we could use and replicate and rule out time and time again, and then you got the specific interventions.’

The digital platform allowed for increased transparency and interoperability. ‘One of the big challenges was that we had so few experts that we couldn’t afford to have cross-contamination, we couldn’t afford to let different teams intermingle with other teams,’ Scott explained. ‘So, we had to use COVID-19 social distancing rules and the practice of that has now turned into the usual practice.’

A continuing challenge
As the webinar concluded, the speakers noted that collaboration between engineers, agility through digital, and interoperability of technology, people and companies have been key to propelling ventilator innovation and manufacturing capabilities. ‘I’ve talked a bit about the need for interoperability, so the learning of how to put those platforms in place have enabled that rapid collaboration,’ Turner affirmed. ‘But also looking at how can we learn about working with standards and regulatory authorities to bring [the product] to market rapidly and to massively compress that new product introduction, that is a lot of learning there, and also working in partnership towards a common purpose.’

Scott mused, ‘I really think it’s about empowering people through communication, but also about openness and transparency. And to some extent, that takes a culture change. But we’ve proven that it can be done. And that is, I think, one of the most critical things that’s come out of this. So that in future when people are saying, “we can’t do that”, you can turn around and say, “it’s been done, why can’t we do it?”’