A company called Toolless?Plastic?Solutions?Inc. is providing significant assistance to Ford in producing ventilators. Within the next 100 days, the U.S. automaker plans to produce 50,000 ventilators.
Toolless?Plastic?Solutions?Inc. of Everett, Washington, is a component manufacturer specializing in plastic parts.
The company is currently working overtime to help Ford by making respirator parts. The company, which employs 17 people on regular shifts at its plant, is working to produce plastic housings for a variety of medical devices.
Toolless is believed to have put all other customer production projects on hold in a bid to do everything it can to work with Ford to help it make much-needed local medical ventilators. As of Friday (April 10), all respirator housings produced by Toolless were to be delivered to Ford.
Ventilators are the most urgently needed medical equipment in the U.S., where many patients with new cases of coronary artery disease are at risk because of breathing difficulties. Ford announced on March 31 that it had partnered with GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of General Electric, to speed up production of ventilators, after registering a patent for a new, simpler ventilator design that does not require electricity to generate air pressure.
"The reduction in production complexity allows us to move more quickly." Jim?Baumbick, Ford's vice president of corporate product line management, said.
As planned, Ford and GE Healthcare will build the GE?AE model ventilator based on the new design described above starting April 20 at Ford's Rawsonville parts plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in collaboration with 500 United Auto Workers members.
Previously, it had been argued that it would take longer, as well as a greater effort, for automakers to convert plants to make products that are radically different from the original.
"The speed at which a plant is converted depends on how similar the new products that are going to be made in the product line are to existing products," said Professor Kaitlin?Wowak, who specializes in industrial supply chains at the University of Notre Dame.? "This will be an important turning point in producing completely different products."
And Jorge?Alvarado, a professor in the department of engineering technology and industrial distribution at Texas A&M University, argued that it would be difficult to complete the design of a respirator or even a surgical mask, arrange for the supply of parts and train workers to make them in a short period of time.
According to the plan, Ford will produce 1,500 respirators by the end of April this year, with that number reaching 12,000 by the end of May and expanding further to 50,000 on July 4th. In addition, United Auto Workers workers will participate in the effort on a voluntary basis, with workers working three shifts.
Ford said that at full capacity, production of the Model AE respirator will reach 7,200 units per week.
Ford also plans to produce two other, more complex ventilator models. It's not clear whether the plastic housings for the ventilators supplied by Toolless will be used for the basic Model AE ventilator or the more expensive and complex GE?R19 or GE?R860 ventilators. Toolless?Plastic?Solutions?Inc. said it would do its best to help Ford produce the ventilator housings even if it had to forgo other orders to fight the outbreak that is raging there.
This article comes from the authors of the Motor Home Chevron, and does not represent the views of the Motor Home Chevron position.