Manufacturing is essential; responding to increase production

Covering news during a global pandemic means what you wrote about yesterday or one hour ago likely has had some change or development since then. Because of the rapid spread of COVID-19, as I left the office Thursday evening, I packed with plans to work remotely until further notice. Our company has always had that infrastructure in place for as long as I have worked at GIE Media, so this wasn’t a hard shift. Sure, home with kids and a spouse – who has been working remote for 10 years – may get to be “boring” as I’ve heard, but as the State of Ohio is under an Stay Home Order until April, 6, 2020, we’ll get through this and our reporting won’t stop. Our team can connect from anywhere. By staying home, we are allowing those whose help is needed now to continue – medical professionals, first responders, and manufacturing of all industries.

And while auto manufacturers may not be manufacturing respirators today, they are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to automation. That’s the rational response from Ventec Life Systems’ CEO, Chris Kiple to Axios’ reporter Joann Muller, saying “Ventilator manufacturers produce thousands of ventilators; auto manufactures produce millions of automobiles — they understand how to scale manufacturing and could be a helpful resource to expedite ventilator production.”

That’s just one item since I left work last week. As we work through the increase of companies offering their expertise, we’ll keep you updated. Here’s a short list to start. Major medical OEMs such as Royal Philips provide regular updates on their work to ramp up production and how they are responding to COVID-19.

I heard from Mid-South Machine that they "have limited experience working with a couple companies in the medical device field… [and they] want to see if there's any way we can help supply these companies with any precision machining needs.

Tooling Tech Group asked our help to get the message out that they have capacity and will make priority any projects that can help alleviate the Covid-19 crisis, including any die, molds, tryout, stampings, and automated assembly.

Web Industries Inc., a precision converter and contract manufacturing organization (CMO), has allocated production capacity at its Holliston, Mass., plant to support developers of COVID-19 lateral flow immunoassay (LFI) diagnostic tests. LFI tests are one type of diagnostic device under research and development as public health leaders seek solutions to efficiently test large numbers of people for COVID-19.

To support President Trump’s invoking of the Defense Production Act to increase COVID-19 related medical equipment production, effective Thursday, March 19, 2020 ASG Jergens Inc. will be implementing an order priority initiative for all medical device manufacturers.

BCN3D launchedcampaign  against Covid-19: “We are here to help” - Get in touch with them at covid19help@bcn3d.com

“This last days, with a global pandemic taking lives and forcing us all to take drastic measures to prevent the Covid-19 virus from disseminating further, there have been many rays of light in the form of innovators worldwide, who are putting their ideas and energy into the task of developing new ways to help those in need.

“These people are an inspiration to us all, and from BCN3D we want to enable them to bring their projects to life, so that help can reach further everyday. For that reason, we have launched from today the campaign to offer all our 3D printing technology to hospitals, medical, and scientific centers that need this technology for the manufacture of respiratory equipment parts that care for patients affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We would like to offer our own printfarm, composed by a total of 63 machines (FFF technology 3Dprinters: Sigma, Sigmax and BCN3D Epsilon), to be used for those projects that can contribute the most to the public benefit in these hard times.

I also received a note about a respirator challenge: Ennomotive has joined other international initiatives for the development of easy-to-build ventilators and makes its global community of 20,000 engineers available to face the challenge.

Based on its experience, ennomotive has chosen to focus on solutions that can adapt or reuse widely used standard industrial components or that use other easy-to-access and universal everyday-life elements.

This online challenge is open worldwide to any engineering professional, company, tech center, maker or scholar from different industries and technical backgrounds that want to propose a solution for this challenge. The final goal is to make a key contribution to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The solutions resulting from this challenge will be open to the public and ennomotive will fund the development of the best prototypes in the next round. Given the urgency, the first deadline for submissions is the March 25, 2020.