Writing? /? Zhu Zhu Lynn
Editing?
Editing Yanping Tu
Design? /? Du Yanping Kai
Source? /?Forbes, by Rich?Blake
Earlier in 2020, General Motors partnered with Ventec?Life?Systems to ship 30,000 ventilators to the U.S. National Stockpile***, which are made up of 10 million parts.Thousands of people at 90 companies employees helped manufacture the parts.
Starting in mid-March, GM and Ventec first discussed their alliance to increase production of Ventec's VOCSN critical care ventilators, a project that moved forward quickly as the severity of the coronavirus and equipment shortages became increasingly apparent. The joint venture immediately hit a roadblock: the plant in India that produces critical VOCSN parts was forced to close due to the spread of the epidemic.
What happened next was that GM ambitiously leveraged its supply chain, along with a range of additive manufacturing (3D printing) technologies, to allow program managers to creatively improve a makeshift supply chain of respirator parts in about three weeks. GM assembled and retrained the labor force normally used to build the engines.
This logistical feat was accomplished before the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act. Still, it was a patriotic wartime mobilization akin to the early 1940s, and the White House prevailed. Vice President Mike?Pence visited GM's revamped plant in Kokomo, Indiana, and gave it a 15-minute tour.
Pence, accompanied by GM CEO Mary Borah, tours GM's Kokomo plant
With all that praise, it's not hard to see why there hasn't been a lot of attention paid to the role of Sauersfeld, Michigan-based ABC Technologies, which makes injection-molded ventilator parts; or Buffalo, N.Y.-based Caplugs which makes vinyl covers that are used to seal the ventilator's external bacterial filters from dust during shipping; or Faspro Technologies in Arlington Heights, Illinois, which renders structural mounting brackets by laser galvanizing them;? or Twin?City?Die?Castings in Minneapolis, which builds miniature pistons using custom molds made by Die-Tech & Engineering in Grand Rapids, Michigan; or Crank?Software in Ottawa,? ), which upgraded its VOCSN operating system to make touch-screen setups easier to use.
The new crown made a difference?
The U.S. has been scrambling for critical equipment over the past few months plagued by the New Crown outbreak, which has put a spotlight on the fragmentation of the healthcare supply chain and continues to force a greater focus on the entire global supply chain, including all industries in every corner of the logistics space.
Supply chain experts and industry insiders say there is now a paradigm shift in the sourcing of raw materials and components. Where something is made, abroad or domestically, is one branch of the decision tree. Another question is how it is made, taking into account automation, 3D printing and other advanced forms of manufacturing. Cost, of course, is another issue.
Interestingly, cost analysis is only part of the overall thought process, not the only driver, which underscores how significant a change in supply chain strategy can be when there are production disruptions related to an epidemic.
Cost-effectiveness seems to be as important, if not second, to resilience, redundancy and flexibility.
General Motors workers making respirators
Ronald?Leibman, an attorney, explained, "For years, the 'just-in-time' or 'lean logistics ' concepts were all the rage." He is a partner and head of the transportation, logistics and supply chain group at McCarter?&?English.
Leibman said lean logistics allows for the creation of efficient, single-source or regionally dependent supply chains, with the overarching goal of minimizing unit costs and keeping inventory levels and associated costs as low as possible.
Short-term supply disruptions, whether caused by Superstorm Sandy or the SARS epidemic, were warning signs that were ignored; lean logistics remains the standard.
The New Crown outbreak changed that. "New Crown was a huge gas pedal." Rebman said.
Crisis of supply chain disruption
As the world descends into crisis, supply chains break down and the true costs of single-source and regional dependence begin to emerge. Years of savings with low-cost but widely distributed suppliers and limited rainy-day reserves are not the main topics of conversation among logistics managers and their supervisors. These days, says Rebman, the discussion centers on "supply chain failures due to the inability to adapt to rapidly changing, unanticipated environments.
Filemon?Schoffer is the co-founder of 3D?Hubs, a company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, that provides manufacturers with a network and platform for technological ************ to help reimagine the supply chain through innovations in 3D printing, CNC machining, and injection molding. He has a macro view of world trends.
Schaefer said a clear trend is that more and more engineers are relying heavily on the use of additive technologies and automation to make parts because they seek lower costs and shorter turnaround times than sourcing parts from suppliers, whether local or overseas.
3D-printed automotive parts
"Offshore" isn't exactly what some would call a buzzword - because while global trade tensions/chauvinism still burn, the world is still interconnected! . Globalization isn't going away, but it's changing. At the same time, ever-improving and increasingly affordable technological advances continue to change the dynamics that drive customer and supplier decisions.
In an effort to improve reliability, Warwick?Acoustics, a high-end headphone maker based in the United Kingdom, is no longer sourcing products from China. In China, the company faced problems with trade, language and time zones. Now Warwick Acoustics uploads CAD files to the 3D?Hubs platform, and the required parts are automatically sent to a competent and suitable supplier and then put into production, according to Schaefer.
Toronto-based nanosatellite manufacturer Kepler, which at one time relied on parts sourced primarily from the Ontario region, was experiencing unnecessarily long production lead times due to the stringent conditions required to gather and evaluate bids. To augment all this, Kepler turned to Europe's 3D Hubs.
The true "global village" of manufacturing is like an industrial saw with carbide blades: they can cut anything in both directions.
Establishing a new supply chain
To support its ventilator manufacturing partnership with General Motors, Bothell, Washington-based medical device maker Ventec needed to update its user interface (UI) software. This involved a partnership with Canada's Cronk Software, which in turn, in order to support these efforts needed to upgrade real-time computing hardware, led to a partnership with India's iWave?Systems?Technologies.
Ventec?VOCSN Critical Care Ventilator with software provided by Kronecker
Davy?Brown, chief technology officer for industrial solutions at electronic sensor maker TE?Connectivity, said, "We're seeing this firsthand. companies are realigning their strategies and adapting to create greater flexibility." He said the new crown epidemic will permanently change the way companies approach supply chain management, reversing the trend toward lean supply chains.
"Manufacturers everywhere are creating regionalized supply chains and identifying secondary and tertiary sources in the event of a sudden disruption." Brown said, "Additionally, companies are changing their material usage strategies due to supply shortages."
Certain compounds, ores, chemicals, plastics, and so on, may no longer even be available, so manufacturers may need to plan to buy raw materials that may cost more, or use other materials altogether. So it is truly astonishing that the global supply chain remains as stubborn and amorphous as it has ever been, including the many things that make multiple trips around the globe between developed and developing countries, and end up cobbled together elsewhere as manufactured goods, which are then exported, and then circle the globe again.
Over the past 40 years, much of the world's manufacturing production has been organized into global value chains (GVCs). As of the summer of 2020, according to a research team from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization's Policy Research and Statistics Department, the New Crown Epidemic has disrupted the central regions of GVCs, with serious implications for international production networks.
However, China's exports rose for the fourth consecutive month in September, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 13, marking a return to full production by producers in the massive global value chain.
China's exports rose for a fourth straight month in September
Analysts at Rabobank said in July that the outbreak, combined with trade and geopolitical tensions, had increased pressure on companies to consider moving their supply chains away from China. "We see clear signs that US supply chains have started to move out of China." They said.
This is based on data collected before the pandemic. in 2019, U.S. imports from China fell by $88 billion. At least $20 billion of that value could have been transferred from China to the U.S., Rabobank analysts Michael?van?der?Veen and Ralph?van?Mechelen said.
The biggest beneficiaries of pulling supply chains out of China include Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico, they said.
The Manufacturing Global Village
Many products are made "onshore" domestically, with supply coming "offshore". This is true for every continent, regardless of which ocean may border it. Even if companies start to "re-embark", it will take decades to unravel such a tightly woven tapestry.
Think of one of the most famous symbols of the American spirit, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which has also proved to be a famous symbol of the global supply chain. The motorcycles are assembled in factories in Wisconsin, Missouri and Pennsylvania, but their parts come from all over the world. Brakes and clutches come from Italy, engine pistons from Austria, suspension from Japan, and other electronics from Mexico and China.
Harley-Davidson motorcycles get their parts from all over the world
In 2008, Newell?Rubbermaid closed a factory in DeWitt, Nebraska, that made the iconic Vise-Grips brand of pliers, and moved the plant to China. The move cut about 300 workers. And it makes clear how harsh profit-driven conglomerates can be under the control of executives who can stand to be seen as callous as long as they can argue that they are acting to maximize shareholder value.
A decade after the closure of the DeWitt Vise-Grips plant, toolmaker Malco?Products in Annandale, Minnesota, renovated the plant to make Eagle?Grip pliers. However, only a small portion of the lost jobs have been restored.Malco?s HVAC?Tools is its largest seller, primarily in the U.S. The company has been able to create more jobs in the U.S., but it has not been able to create more jobs. Whether DeWitt can create more jobs will depend on the company's continued efforts to sell more tools in Latin America and South Korea.
No Minneapolis-made product currently draws more attention to the complexity of global supply chains than 3M's N95 medical masks. In an interview with CNN in September, Mike Roman, CEO of Minneapolis-based 3M, said that demand for the "gold standard" masks exceeds not only 3M's production capacity, but that of the entire mask manufacturing industry.
3M CEO Mike Roman
Everyone's a part of this
Science writer David?H.?Freedman said, "The U.S. may well be struggling just to keep healthcare workers safely stocked up for at least a year."
As the documentary Frontline recently exposed, warnings of America's overreliance on foreign-made protective gear have been coming in over the past decade, but they have been ignored.
In addition to blaming its predecessors, the Trump administration also blamed 3M.
But 3M is on track to produce 2 billion masks this year. More than half of those will be made in the United States.
Freeman said Honeywell, meanwhile, is expanding its capacity to make 250 million masks a year.
A new manufacturer recently formed, Miami-based Maskco?Technologies, is looking to produce hundreds of millions of masks a year using machines made in China.
Mask production plant
Meanwhile, Ventec Life Systems continues to make respirators at plants in Possum, Washington, and Kokomo, Indiana.
After delivering its 30,000th respirator to the federal government in late August, GM fulfilled its entire order in 154 days and then formally transferred control of its respirator manufacturing operations in Kokomo to Ventec.
"We've come through tough times to help the country. " GM Group chief J.C.?Barnett said in a statement, "We've done our part. It was the right thing to do."
GM said everyone involved in the program deserves credit.
Earlier in 2020, Todd?Olson, CEO of Twin Cities Mold Casting, said in an interview with NPR, "We've been in business for 100 years, and this is probably the most important moment in our 100 years. "
Robotics technician Ian?Cartier said, "We come to every challenge that we encounter that day with the attitude that we're going to face it, solve it, and overcome it."
This article comes from the authors of the Motorhome Cartier and does not represent the views of the Motorhome Cartier.