JULY/AUGUST 2020 VENTILATOR CHALLENGE UK
What followed was a period of understanding
the devices and how the consortium members
could help both Smiths and Penlon scale-up their
production to the required levels.
“We started to assemble more capability
within the consortium,” explains Elsy. “Many of
our members, such as the Formula 1 teams and
Siemens Healthineers, understand the standards
that are required in high-precision engineering
and could work with the ventilator manufacturers
to ensure we met the required quality.”
Consortium members’ factories were
retooled to make vital parts: seven brand new
manufacturing lines were set up at factories
operated by Ford, Airbus, STI, GKN, Rolls Royce
and McLaren, and over 3,000 people were
reskilled (remotely – see box, p20) to be able to
manufacture and test each component. The scale
of industrialisation is staggering – before the
pandemic, Penlon could produce just four or five
devices per week; at the peak of the consortium’s
capability, they were making about 300 a day.
This was achieved by setting up an entire
medical supply chain, consisting of three parallel
factories – at Airbus in Broughton, where 550
people worked five shifts across eight lines;
Ford in Dagenham, which operated 24 hours a
day across multiple shifts; and McLaren – to
produce key parts, all of which were brought
together by Hook-based STI before being passed
to Penlon for final tests.
“It’s a serious bit of industrialisation, all of
which was up and running within a number
of weeks,” remarks Elsy.
Supply hurdles
As you can imagine, there were some significant
issues faced by the team, especially in the early
days of the consortium. One such example came
in the shape of a critical microprocessor found
in the Penlon device. “We investigated where
we could source these from and discovered that
they’re no longer manufactured, and existing
global stocks are at zero,” says Elsy. “That felt like
a real roadblock that could take months to solve.”
Luckily, McLaren, along with electronics
distributor, Arrow, found the data for the chip,
procured some manufacturing space (with help
from the government) and recreated the chip
from scratch, to an identical specification as the
original device, all within a couple of weeks.
“That was an incredible undertaking,” enthuses
Elsy. “It gives a sense of the scale of the challenges
we faced, and how we just used engineering force
to make it work.”
“Rule one: no egos”
At the heart of the Ventilator Challenge has been
as sense of teamwork to react to a national crisis –
even amongst companies that would traditionally
consider themselves competitors. There was
no hierarchy amongst the companies involved,
something that Elsy was keen to stress from
the start. “Rule one of the consortium was ‘no
egos’,” he says.
Dick Elsy has led the consortium to
deliver what has been described as
‘engineering’s finest hour’
Ventilator Challenge UK members
Accenture
Airbus
AMRC Cymru
Arrow
DHL
Ford
GKN Aerospace
Haas F1
Hilton
HVM Catapult
Inspiration Healthcare
McLaren
Mercedes-AMG F1
Meggitt
Microsoft
Newton
Penlon
PTC
Quick Release
Racing Point
Renault Sport Racing
Renishaw
Rolls-Royce
Siemens UK
Siemens Healthineers
Smiths Medical
STFC Harwell
STI
Toyota Racing Development
Unilever
Ultra Electronics
Williams Advanced Engineering
Williams F1
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