April 2020 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Guest Post: Coronavirus and the Basic Rules of Lean

Today’s Guest Post comes from Dr. Jeff Heyl, at Lincoln University in Christchurch, NZ. He is currently Associate Academic Dean and Director of the Centre for Lean Education and Research.

As the coronavirus crisis has developed, one key element of the response planning is accurate measurement of any infection. Unreliable measures meant that public health labs could not perform the disease surveillance required to predict and minimize harm before the virus became widely established. The impact has been magnified by the inability to rapidly expand the availability of testing. Yet developing tests for viral infections is a well-understood process. Within one week of the release of the genetic sequence of the virus, tests were successfully being administered in many countries. But the early test released in the US were flawed. What happened?

It seems the problem was a very basic manufacturing error. The CDC was charged with creating the initial test kits. They had considerable experience in this and placed well-qualified people in charge of the project. They also chose to manufacture the kits, and this is where the real problem arose.

The CDC failed to follow common laboratory protocols and procedures, which resulted in contamination of the components in the test kits. The test reported false positives at 24 of the 26 labs that received the early shipments. There should have been no confusion. The CDC had the protocols and procedures with complete documentation, but they were not followed.

The problem, however, started earlier during the design phase. A decision was made to include a 3rd component to the test, and this added complexity while not providing any useful information for the testing labs. It was intended to differentiate COVID-19 from other related viruses, but the genetic sequence of COIVD-19 is unique and the test was unnecessary. The CDC designed a product no customer needed or wanted.

So in a sense, it’s not surprising the test was fatally flawed. Two basic rules of lean were violated – customer focus and follow the rules. The failures may have resulted in higher rates of illnesses and fatalities. Most commercial failures don’t have such visible or tragic consequences, but their implications for firms implementing lean systems can be just as profound.

OM in the News: Monitoring Employees Who Work From Home

As we note in Chapter 10, labor is a costly component of most OM activities. So as we have moved to computer-oriented tasks, rather than manual tasks, new tools for evaluating productivity have been developed. Now with millions of employees suddenly doing these tasks from home, more managers want to know how employees spend their time, writes The Wall Street Journal (April 20, 2020).

One new technology provides the ability to install a tool that takes computer screenshots of home-based employees every 10 minutes and records how much time they spend on certain activities. It gives managers productivity scores for remote workers or detailed reports on which tasks consume their days. Other tools are designed to catch employees who might be more tempted to download files from the company or violate security rules. At Teramind, whose technology can give employers a live look at employees’ computer screens or recordings of videos of their activities, inquiries have recently tripled, and 1/3 of the company’s 2,000 clients have requested additional licenses to track more users.

One S. Carolina manager states: “This is not a witch hunt to try and find the guy who spends 20 minutes a day on the news. The tool to track web browsing and time spent on work-related apps will pay longer-term dividends.We’re able to get a lot more granular insights into how much time they’re spending on individual tasks. Each staffer has access to their own data and can see how their own productivity levels fluctuate.”

Employers have wide legal latitude to use tracking tools, though the products can test employees’ threshold for privacy concerns “Frankly, employees already have an incentive to be productive, just by mere fact of wanting to keep their jobs,” says one Cornell prof.

Classroom discussion questions:

Are there ethical and privacy issues that need to be addressed here?
Why is such software now an important OM tool?

OM in the News: International Supply Chains May Prove Hard to Break

The supposed rush to reshore global supply chains may end up going nowhere. Those expecting large-scale deglobalization and the return of domestic production for many goods might be disappointed, writes The Wall Street Journal (April 23. 2020), with reports suggesting that global sourcing remains in full force.

Bringing some manufacturing home for medical or security purposes might make sense. Amid the U.S.-China trade war, reshoring was already a major issue of discussion before the coronavirus arrived. American imports of Asian-made goods (as a percentage of domestic manufacturing output) dropped in 2019, falling from a record high to the lowest level in 5 years. But that decline was due to a sharp fall in Chinese imports. Imports from the rest of low-income Asia actually rose, and U.S. manufacturing output was roughly flat.

This isn’t exactly deglobalization. Manufacturing shifting from one country to another as countries grow richer and pivot to higher-value manufacturing isn’t new. Just as China took a greater share of manufacturing once done in S. Korea and Japan, Bangladesh and Vietnam are well placed to take a portion of manufacturing that, for now, is done in China. It is inefficient for wealthy countries to attempt to resume much low-value production currently done abroad, as we point out in Ch. 2’s discussion of the theory of comparative advantage (see p.46).

Even in high-value sectors, a lack of knowledge, experience and competitiveness in niche areas are difficult to surmount. For example, Japan last year restricted exports of smartphone screen components to S. Korea. (Despite Korea’s dominant position in electronics, screens are largely produced in Japan). Manufacturers such as Samsung and LG were left hanging. Korea managed to reduce its Japanese components modestly (from 92% of the total to 85%) by massively expanding imported parts from the U.S., Belgium and Germany.

Ideological commitment to globalization didn’t drive the growth of major value chains in the first place, and its decreased popularity is unlikely to unwind them even with the current pandemic.

Classroom discussion questions:

What risks have operations managers come to discover with outsourcing?
What steps has the U.S. just taken to increase its supply of medical goods which are predominately manufactured in China?

OM in the News: The Crash of the $8.5 Billion Global Flower Trade

As people everywhere cancel events and flower orders, the ripples reach into Dutch auction halls and Kenyan rose fields. A delayed wedding is hardly a disaster during a pandemic that’s killing 1000’s of people daily. But in greenhouses from Ecuador and Colombia to Kenya, growers were already stacking roses in compost heaps. Within days of the lockdown orders in the U.S. and Europe, demand for stems evaporated.

The crash of the $8.5 billion global flower trade shows how quickly and distinctively the coronavirus is disrupting supply chains, reports Businessweek (April 20, 2020). The flower trade is a miracle of modern capitalism. A chain of cold storage starts with stems being picked in far-flung places, then packed into refrigerated trucks, driven to refrigerated planes, and flown to Amsterdam to be auctioned off. They’re then repacked into more cold trucks and planes and delivered to supermarkets, florists, and bridal bouquets across Asia, Europe, and the U.S. within a day.

The auctions are run by a cooperative, Royal FloraHolland, whose site handles the bulk of the global trade out of a Dutch concrete warehouse which is larger than 75 soccer fields– one of the biggest buildings in Europe. The blooms are sold under the traditional Dutch auction system, in which prices start high then tick lower as a clock counts down. The first buyer to pounce wins. The average day sees more than 100,000 transactions.

Before the pandemic, 42 cargo flights arrived each week from Kenya, whose climate allows roses to grow year-round. That nation ships about $1 billion worth of flowers a year, making it Europe’s biggest supplier. More than 150,000 people toil on Kenyan flower farms. The work is grueling, with long shifts in steamy greenhouses, and laborers earn as little as $70 a month.

Classroom discussion questions:

In Ch. 2 of your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text, we see that companies achieve competitive advantage in one of 3 ways. Which best describes the flower industry?
How does this supply chain (discussed in Ch. 11 on p. 446) differ from a typical manufacturing one?

OM in the News: The History of Supply Chains

In 1970, there was no FedEx, no internet, no PCs, no cellphones, no Amazon, no TSA, no 3D printers, no Google, and no Uber, writes IndustryWeek (April 17, 2020). Nixon hadn’t gone to China yet, so offshoring wasn’t a major issue. There were no supply chain planning systems, no warehouse management systems, no UPC barcodes, no online marketplaces. It was a much slower-paced economy than the frenetic pace the supply chain moves at now.

In 1970 we didn’t even have anything called the “supply chain.” Although the basic concept of SCM dates back to the 1950s, the actual term “supply chain” wasn’t coined until 1982. How different running a manufacturing operation was in 1970. The EPA wasn’t introduced until late that year, OSHA didn’t launch until 1971, and the trucking and rail industries weren’t deregulated until 1980.

When we wrote the first edition of our textbook, Production and Operations Management, in 1988, we didn’t mention the following: (as they either hadn’t been invented yet or nobody had associated them with SCM): drones, the Internet of Things, same-day delivery, omni-channel distribution, machine learning, Uber-style freight transportation apps, blockchain, cobots, RFID, and virtual reality,

We also didn’t mention the impact the coronavirus would have on supply chains, or any of the other major disruptions we’ve seen in recent years, such as the swine flu of 2009, the Icelandic volcanic eruption of 2010, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, or the three deadly hurricanes of 2017. But we’ve learned that supply chains—and the people managing them—are incredibly resilient. In 25 years people will likely look back at how slow-paced supply chains moved in 2020. Will the convergence of GPS, RFID, wearable and supply chain visibility technologies lead to the point that everybody will carry some sort of ID chip that will make obsolete the idea of cash and credit cards?

Classroom discussion questions:

What technologies have the potential to seriously impact current supply chains?
Will the global move toward sustainability be impacted by the virus pandemic?

OM in the News: The Food Chain’s Weakest Link

This S. Dakota Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse was the nation’s single largest coronavirus “hot spot,” with 16% of the 3,700 employees testing positive.

The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his 1906 novel, “The Jungle.” Many are giant, sleek refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and gut carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors. The jobs are often grueling and dangerous, but meat producers have some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.

Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency, have become major “hot spots” for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers, writes The New York Times (April 19, 2020). The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for 98% of U.S. slaughtering.

Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, is like closing an airport hub. It backs up hog and beef production across the country, crushes prices paid to farmers and eventually leads to months of meat shortages. “Slaughterhouses are a critical bottleneck in the system,” said one SCM professor.

The ripple effects of the virus are now being felt across the entire meat supply chain, all the way to grocery stores. More than a dozen beef, pork and chicken processing plants have closed or are running at greatly reduced speeds. The number of cattle slaughtered has dropped 22% from a year ago. Plant closings have also caused a major disruption, leaving many ranchers with nowhere to send their animals.

Large numbers of employees have become infected in other businesses where people work close together. But the pandemic has caused more serious disruption in the meat industry, where consolidation has given outsize importance to a small number of plants.

Classroom discussion questions:

Chapter 11 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text examines ethics within the supply chain. Relate the slaughterhouse supply chain to this issue.
Detail the meat supply chain.

OM in the News: 5G Promises Radical Overhaul for Supply Chains

The rollout of 5G, reports The Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2020) has the potential to transform the supply chain— helping companies more precisely measure consumer demand, cut waste and react in real time as situations change.

Supply and demand. Part of the problem with modern supply chains is that, often, businesses and their suppliers have only a vague idea of where goods are at any one point in time, what condition they are in and whether they are even needed at their destination. There are limits in current 4G networks to how many sensors, cameras and other internet-connected devices can be supported at any one time. The enhanced bandwidth and stability that 5G offers will enable far more devices to be live on a single connection. This new level of analytical capability will help solve one of the toughest challenges for supply-chain management: figuring out how much of something people want at any particular moment.

Food waste. Although 820 million people around the world are undernourished, up to 30% of all food is lost or wasted. Oversupply in grocery stores is a major source of overall waste. 5G can help, for example, by enabling real-time data transmissions to monitor failures in refrigerated containers. 5G will also allow for greater route optimization, taking into account traffic and other information. Businesses will incur fewer oversupplies of goods, reducing their impact on the environment by producing less waste and requiring fewer deliveries.

Infrastructure overhaul. A more immediate benefit for supply-chain specialists will be the ability for wireless 5G to sidestep aging infrastructure that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to replace. For example, the ability for all of the thousands of pharmacies across the U.S. to exchange data in real time isn’t currently possible using the existing infrastructure. 5G will have a tremendous effect on getting prescriptions to patients in a timely fashion and improving customer experiences.

Classroom discussion questions:

What is the difference between 4G and 5G?
Summarize the SCM advantages of 5G.

OM in the News: Solving the Health-Care Equipment Supply Shortage

“As we struggle to come to terms with the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most frustrating sights is witnessing front-line health-care workers begging for more masks, protective gowns, testing kits, ventilators and intensive-care beds,” writes MIT Prof. Yossi Sheffi in The Wall Street Journal (April 10, 2020).

The crisis has focused attention on just-in-time inventory principles. The discipline and mantra that “inventory is waste” was built out of the Toyota Production System (see Chapter 16 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text) that has become iconic in supply chain around the world.

The JIT philosophy calls for lean inventories and tight connections between companies and their suppliers. It reduces manufacturing and supply chain costs, as well as response times along the supply chain. All sorts of industries have applied its principles, including health care. When hospital JIT supply chains run as advertised, the savings in those costly and high-stakes systems can be substantial.

However, supply chains built on precise and timely deliveries are vulnerable to unexpected and large-scale disruptions. The fallout can become acute when supplies aren’t available when demand spikes. This is one of the main reasons the coronavirus pandemic has crippled health-care supply chains. Clearly, JIT systems haven’t been up to the challenge, and there have been suggestions that medical supply chains should build more “just-in-case” inventory to ensure they are prepared for such outbreaks. Yet the benefits of JIT are just too significant to forgo. Organizations that rely on large inventories won’t be able to compete with facilities that remain lean, and that is true for hospitals.

Instead, says Sheffi, the U.S. must keep a very large, centrally-managed inventory of health-care supplies in several locations around the country to supplement the inventory maintained at each hospital. The parallel here is the strategic oil reserves. We prepare for shortages of oil and weapons in times of crisis. Medical supplies are just as critical.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the three main principles of Lean/Toyota Production Systems discussed in Ch. 16?
Sheffi’s plan is future-based. What can be done today to help the shortages?

OM in the News: The COVID-19’s Effect on Flight Capacity

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the travel world into a tailspin, with a staggering impact on the $880 billion global airline industry. The earliest pains were felt in February, as flight capacity in and out of China dropped 71% compared to 2019. Flight capacity for Hong Kong went down by 92%. Flights to and from Italy plummeted 89%, while Germany and Spain have 93% less capacity as of this month.

So it is no surprise that airlines have been forced to ground a significant portion of their fleets, reports Forbes (April 4, 2020). Large aircraft like the superjumbo A380 were some of the first to be grounded, with diminished demand for the seats. However, whether it’s widebodies or narrowbodies, airlines still have the issue of where to store these planes. Delta and American are each parking about half of their fleets – or more than 1,200 aircraft. Tulsa Airport has been able to close a seldom-used runway to fit about 50 American Airlines planes, charging them about $150 a day to store. American also parked 100 planes in New Mexico, 50 in Pittsburgh, and more in Mobile and Greensboro. In addition to the cost of parking, a facility may charge maintenance costs that begin at about $2,000 per plane a month. Every day, each plane needs to have its engine run, has to taxi far enough for the tires to rotate fully, and has to have its hydraulics, avionics, and electronics checked.

A grounded fleet of British Airway planes sit on the runway at Glasgow

Capacity planning, the topic of Supplement 7, is difficult enough during normal times. But look at the capacity cuts made these 6 airlines: Ryaniar, Flydubai, and Spice Jet, 100%; American, 80%; United, 65%; Southwest, 60%. And on Sunday, April 12th, 122,029 travelers flew through U.S airports–compared to 2.5 million on the same day a year ago!

Classroom discussion questions:

What is the difference between demand management and capacity management?
How does this differ from the capacity issues faced in the recession (2008-2010) and the 9-11 terrorist attacks?

Guest Post: Storytelling Using Data Analytics During Coronavirus Outbreak

Today’s Guest Post comes from Charles Render, whose analytics firm (render-consulting.com) works with client organizations of all sizes, leveraging big data to optimize their businesses.

During these unprecedented times, data analytics and data visualization experts have a unique opportunity to measure the magnitude of the Coronavirus’ impact on the business world. The “big data” trend that has taken off the last decade has not been around long enough to experience a world-defining event such as this, and this storytelling opportunity is too good to pass up for data scientists. Data visualization is not just about giving answers; it is also about presenting the opportunity to ask new questions we have not yet thought to ask.

For example, which companies/industries are benefiting from quarantining and people staying home? Uber Eats, a food delivery service, has experienced a spike in Google searches while OpenTable, a restaurant reservation service, has dropped to almost no traffic.

Which stocks could rise while the rest of the market is struggling? Are there any companies that may get a free increase in stock share as a result of having the right name? After many investors mistook Zoom Technologies (stock ticker ZOOM) for Zoom Video Communications (stock ticker ZM) during a rise in the latter’s popularity amidst COVID-19, Zoom Technologies’ stock price surged about 318% in 8 days.

These are just two examples of the data visualization tools that are discussed in Module G (Applying Analytics to Big Data in Operations Management) of your OM text.

OM in the News: Where is All the Toilet Paper?

“What does toilet paper have to do with a global pandemic? Nothing,” writes The Orlando Sentinel (April 9, 2020).

Yet millions of people have been panicking about their household supply. Stores shelves have been emptied. Amazon is often out of stock. And social media is bursting with jokes and pleas for a roll or two. Some were stockpiling last month in advance of government lockdown orders.

It’s a common reaction in times of a crisis, when consumers feel a need for control and security. Online and in-store U.S. toilet paper sales rose 51% between Feb. 24 and March 10, as buyers started getting uneasy about the growing number of virus cases. But sales rocketed a whopping 845% on March 11 and 12 as states announced lockdowns.

Toilet paper flows from paper mills to retail stores through a tight, efficient supply chain. It is bulky and not very profitable, so retailers don’t keep a lot of inventory on hand; they just get frequent shipments and restock their shelves. The amount of toilet paper the average American uses hasn’t changed; it’s around 141 rolls per year (compared to 134 rolls in Germany and just 49 rolls in China). But even small changes in buying habits can throw everything into disarray, as we see with the bullwhip effect discussed in Supplement 11 of your OM text.

With a regional disruption like a hurricane, stores can redirect some inventory to the affected area. But a global pandemic doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room. The big three U.S. toilet paper companies — Georgia-Pacific, P&G, and Kimberly-Clark — were already running their toilet paper plants 24 hours a day before coronavirus hit. That’s the only way they can make a profit on such a low-margin product. But now the companies are trying to increase output by making fewer varieties of toilet paper.

Classroom discussion questions:

Explain the bullwhip effect.
What supply chain options are available?

Guest Post: Building A Robust Supply Chain During A Pandemic

Today’s Guest Post comes from Prof. Jonathan Opata, who teaches Operations & Supply Chain Management at George Mason University, Southern New Hampshire University and Northern Virginia Community College

China is critical to the supply chains of many companies because it is the world’s leading manufacturer and its 2nd-largest economy. Government directives on strict quarantine measures have led to economic and supply chain disruptions globally. Companies must ensure risk management in the face of the pandemic. This requires integrated supply chain visibility, better forecasting and intelligent capacity building to meet demand.

Currently, many companies have limited access to employees and logistics, and face the closure of factories because of the ongoing measures to control the spread. This has resulted in a bullwhip effect and high product costs. Here are 6 critical areas for organizations to focus on that you can discuss with your students:

1. Develop Alternative Supply Sources: Developing and looking for new sources of supply is the premier strategy.
2. Create Business Continuity Plans: These plans should pinpoint contingencies in critical areas and include backup plans for transportation, communications, supply, and cash flow. Suppliers and customers need be involved in developing these plans.
3. Create a Comprehensive Emergency Operations Center: This operations center will require integration of company-wide data sources to allow visibility into daily operations.
4. Develop a Collaborative Approach to deal with transportation suppliers to increase visibility of shipments in the supply chain pipeline. This means conducting risk analysis and teaming up with all suppliers to act on supply issues.
5. Redesign to Source from Local Content: Companies need to have production facilities with local sources of supply in each of their major markets, to spread the risk.
6. Align the procurement strategy with Supplier Relationships: Companies should rely on small groups of critical suppliers and maintain a mutually win-win relationship with each. Also, companies need to adjust for higher than normal demand and proactively design robustness into the network to minimize the impact of the bullwhip effect.

These strategies are critical for both short-term recovery and longer-term contingency planning. When companies work together, they can withstand this pandemic and come out more reliable than ever.

OM in the News: Why the Richest Nation Can’t Get You a Face Mask

The U.S. is scrambling for surgical masks

Over the course of the past 50 years, the U.S has organized its economy following the theory of comparative advantage (see Ch. 2 in your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text). That means outsourcing to whatever external organization can provide the good or service at the best price. For much of this half century, the most cost-efficient strategy has been outsourcing to Asia. But outsourcing the wrong activities can be a disaster, as we now see in the coronavirus epidemic.

Critical supplies like medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and food have been outsourced to China. “Most Americans know their iPhone comes from China but they do not know that more than 80% of all of their antibiotics, vitamin C and tilapia, 50% of their cod and apple juice, and 34% of their mushrooms come from China as well,” says one OM professor .

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by The Wall Street Journal headline (April 2, 2020): “Why the Richest Country on Earth Can’t Get You a Face Mask.” Indeed, Americans are asking why the most technologically advanced nation in the world can’t provide its citizens and health-care workers with lifesaving medical equipment.

Years of underinvestment in pandemic planning is a big part of the answer. But as in the pharmaceutical sector—highly dependent on Chinese and Indian producers—a reliance on global supply chains is also making life difficult for Western hospitals struggling to source gear. 85% of global medical mask-production capacity is in China. It is also a major producer of the polypropylene fibers that filter out dust and pathogens in the N95 respirators medical professionals rely on. The U.S. said in early March that it has only about 1% of the medical masks it would need to combat a year-long epidemic.

When the pandemic ends, one of the enduring changes it causes could be a major reassessment of complex global supply chains for critical medical goods.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the advantages of outsourcing?
Why can’t the U.S. produce the billion masks it needs this year?

OM in the News: Supplying and Shipping Take on New Importance

Companies like UPS are experiencing a boom in home deliveries

Just a few weeks ago, many people would have been hard-pressed to talk about the nation’s supply chain, writes The New York Times (April 1, 2020). But with shortages of protective gear for medical workers and basics like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, the inner workings of transporting goods from manufacturers to consumers, medical professionals and other businesses suddenly has taken on new importance.

“Shippers are facing huge challenges to ensure that they have the tools and have capacity,” said the CEO of an online trucking marketplace. “And the truckers had enormous pressure as well because they can’t work from home and are constantly on the road.”

Some manufacturing plants and warehouses are understaffed, so the truckers that went expecting a quick turnaround for loading could wait as much as 15 hours for their cargo. Pennsylvania briefly decided to close all of its rest stops in a move intended to protect travelers, but the closures also impeded long-haul shipping without roadside facilities, so some were later reopened. And there are driver shortages, compounded by the aging population of truck drivers, whom some deem to be more at risk to die from the virus than those who are younger.

Delivery companies like FedEx and UPS are experiencing a Christmas-like boom in home deliveries, while shipments to business, which have closed by the thousands on government orders, have deteriorated. One estimate shows that business-to-business shipments could decline up to 25% for months. Delivering to homes is generally less profitable because drivers ferry fewer packages across many more stops.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What are the challenges facing shippers?

2. How are each of the six shipping systems described in Ch.11 (in the section on Logistics Management) impacted by the current crisis?

OM in the News: GM Hustles to Pump Out Ventilators

Factory workers will assemble ventilators at an idled GM facility in Kokomo, Ind.

On March 19, four GM engineers boarded a late 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 a GM car dealership. Ventec execs 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.

A shortage of the machines for patients with the coronovirus has sent the government and private sectors scrambling, reports The Wall Street Journal (March 30, 2020). Manufacturers from GM, Ford and Tesla to medical-device giants like Medtronic, and even British vacuum-maker Dyson, are gearing up to boost production. GM said it would start producing ventilators at its Kokomo facility and ramp up to 10,000 machines a month. (The auto industry had also been drafted to help during World War II).

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—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. GM has shut most of its N. American factories to keep the virus from spreading among workers. Still 100’s of workers volunteered for the job to help the nation.

Classroom discussion questions:

How do the manufacturing processes differ between a GM and a Ventec?
What strengths does GM bring to the table for this project?