By Mike Colias
When President Trump last week criticized General Motors Co.'s
effort to produce ventilators, GM executives were flabbergasted.
They felt the company was being unfairly targeted by the president,
say people familiar with their thinking.
GM had begun collaborating with a ventilator company a couple of
weeks earlier. It had mobilized more than 1,000 employees and
nearly 100 auto suppliers to start making the machines, which can
be used to help patients with the disease caused by the new
coronavirus.
"We won't let it deter us," GM global manufacturing chief Gerald
Johnson said in an interview over the weekend. "Every ventilator is
a life."
From GM's account, the car maker has been hustling to do its
part since mid-March.
Mr. Trump on Friday expressed frustration with the timeline,
expecting the company and its ventilator partner, Ventec Life
Systems, would be able to ramp up faster.
On March 19, four GM engineers, including the company's
manufacturing chief for North America, boarded a late-night flight
from Detroit to Seattle.
By daybreak, they were huddled in a conference room at Ventec, a
small maker of ventilators whose entire operation is smaller than
some GM car dealerships. Ventec executives had turned over
blueprints for the roughly 700 parts that go into its ventilator to
the GM engineers, hoping to get their help scaling up
production.
The GM contingent, which usually specializes in designing and
sourcing parts for building vehicles, used their smartphones to
take videos of the toaster-sized machines being built by hand. A
box of parts was overnighted to Michigan.
"The ramp-up schedule we're committing to is faster than
anything we've ever done," said Phil Kienle, GM's head of
manufacturing in North America, who was among the GM team that
visited Ventec and described the effort in an interview Sunday.
"We're all outside our comfort zone."
A shortage of the machines for patients with the disease,
Covid-19, has sent government officials and the private sector
scrambling. Manufacturers from GM, Ford Motor Co. and Tesla Inc. to
medical-device giants like Medtronic Inc. and even British
vacuum-maker Dyson are gearing up to boost production. Governors
and hospitals are pleading for more and warning of the need to
ration the machines.
Ford said Monday it is working with General Electric Co. to make
50,000 ventilators at one of the auto maker's facilities in
Michigan by early July.
Medtronic on Monday said it would publicly share the design
specifications for a ventilator product to allow other companies to
explore rapid production of the devices.
GM disclosed on March 20 that it was working with Ventec to
expand ventilator production. Ventec was taking the lead on
discussions with the Trump administration, and three days later,
submitted paperwork to supply the federal government with
ventilators, people familiar with the matter said.
Ventec had provided a range of possibilities for monthly
production of ventilators, with one as high as 20,000 a month,
these people said. Each scenario required a gradual increase for
the GM operation to get up and running, they said.
The Trump administration was under the impression it could move
to full production faster. "They said they were going to give us
40,000 much needed Ventilators, 'very quickly'," Mr. Trump said in
a Twitter post Friday. "Now they are saying it will only be 6000,
in late April."
Over the weekend, GM sought to emphasize the extent of the
company's efforts to administration officials, a person familiar
with the matter said. The president's tone changed Sunday, saying
the auto maker is doing a "fantastic job."
GM said it would start producing ventilators at one of its
facilities in Indiana and eventually ramp up to 10,000 of the
machines a month, although only a few thousand will be made in the
first several weeks.
The auto industry has been drafted to help during past national
crises. GM and Ford built trucks and aircraft for allied forces
during World War II, part of a broader effort by American industry
known as the "Arsenal of Democracy." Ford in the 1940s developed an
"iron lung" to help polio patients.
There is little overlap between making cars -- a highly
automated process involving fast-moving assembly lines and robotic
welding machines, which plays out in vast factories, some the size
of 100 football fields -- and the labor-intensive job of building
ventilators, which are largely hand-built at small
workstations.
But car companies are being called on to help because they
typically work with thousands of parts suppliers -- many making
components similar to those needed for a ventilator -- and are
accustomed to manufacturing at a large scale.
At the same time, car makers have been in crisis mode themselves
from the new coronavirus. On March 18, GM said it would shut most
of its North American factories to prevent the virus from spreading
among workers. GM is scrambling to conserve cash, drawing down
billions of dollars in credit lines and deferring 20% of pay for
nearly 70,000 salaried workers globally.
But it did move forward on the ventilators, after Kenneth
Chenault, a former American Express Co. CEO helping to mobilize
executives to fight the coronavirus outbreak, called GM's CEO Mary
Barra and suggested her team talk to Ventec.
An initial flurry of conference calls between GM and Ventec
executives revealed the magnitude of the task: the companies
envision expanding Ventec's output more than twentyfold, eventually
to more than 10,000 ventilators a month. But the supply chain could
never handle those volumes, the teams concluded, because ventilator
suppliers are being flooded with requests to crank up
production.
On March 20, Ms. Barra talked to Shilpan Amin, who is a few
months into his job as head of GM's massive parts-purchasing arm.
Ms. Barra gave Mr. Amin 48 hours to figure out if GM's supply base
could source every single part so that GM could set up its own
factory to build them.
By then, some of the videos and documents from Ventec's
headquarters had made their way to Mr. Amin's people in Detroit.
Hundreds of GM purchasing managers were assigned to fan out across
their suppliers contacts in search of recruits.
Around 10:30 p.m. that night, Tracy Skupien, operations director
for Detroit car-parts supplier Tompkins Products Inc., was at home
when an urgent call from her contact at GM interrupted her glass of
wine. He was about to email her detailed blueprints and
specifications for 40 metal ventilator parts.
"He needed to know which ones we thought we could start making
within a week," she said. "I said, 'We're on it.'"
Her company got a contract for three aluminum parts and began
building them last week at two plants being run by skeleton crews
in Detroit, where Covid-19 cases are rising sharply.
By Saturday, inside a large conference room at GM's engineering
hub in suburban Detroit, ventilator parts were spread across tables
for inspection. Dozens of supplier representatives streamed through
to get a closer look at the parts. In between visits, cleaning
crews descended on the room to disinfect the widgets and
surfaces.
In recent days, workers at an idled GM facility in Kokomo, Ind.,
were ripping out carpet and knocking down walls to install large
workstations where hundreds of union-represented factory workers
will assemble ventilators. The employees volunteered for the job
even as other car factories remain shut down to prevent the spread
of the virus.
"It was my choice to come in and work here," said Brian Shirley,
a millwright helping to install equipment at the factory. "It's a
great opportunity to help the public."
--Michael C. Bender contributed to this article.
Write to Mike Colias at Mike.Colias@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 30, 2020 17:40 ET (21:40 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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