Manufacturing a force for good during the pandemic

John Carlson, president of health solutions at Flex, examines the positive role that manufacturing has had during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The healthcare industry likes to deal with surety and known facts. But what do you do when the situation is fast moving and the facts are still being discovered? It’s difficult to make a commitment to treatment solutions when the data we have is changing every day. For a global pandemic, the challenge isn’t just about foreseeing the treatments we’ll need tomorrow, it’s about being able to react quickly with solutions for today.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry had to find out how to hit a moving target. This involves having the ability to pivot with speed and reacting on a mass scale to meet the huge demand. Just like the epidemiologists tracking the spread of COVID-19, the companies responsible for producing a response are learning all the time too. One thing has become immediately clear. No single historic event has so clearly crystalised the power of technology for good – and the immense importance of robust supply chain management, as COVID-19.

From the start of the outbreak in China to the global pandemic we are experiencing today, the healthcare industry has been in urgent need of medical equipment to help manage the disease. There’s a requirement for immense scale delivered to unprecedented timelines. This is a story of how manufacturing and supply chain expertise, married with vital input from partners, customers and other stakeholders helped the extended medical community to meet this demand.

Let’s look at one piece of equipment – ventilators – to see the context and scale of the challenge. Usually, there are about 20,000 ventilators sold in the US annually. With the onset of the pandemic, estimates showed the US alone needed up to 500,000. Put simply, that’s 25 years of demand that must be fulfilled in a matter of months. A similar challenge exists for hundreds of tools across dozens of countries heavily impacted.

For such a sudden boom in demand, the typical supply chain and lead times go out of the window. There just isn’t enough time to produce the equipment needed globally. Then there are other challenges. Some markets had a particular need to manufacture large amounts of medical equipment but they had no local capability to do so. They’d never needed to. But when border restrictions are put into place and supply chains become regionalised, there’s a need for manufacturing to take place in regional centres that have adequate reach. Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures and, in many cases, this meant starting from scratch.

As a global medical device manufacturer, Flex is present in every hospital and pharmacy around the world but even for us, it’s impossible to work alone on such a massive issue. Much needed partnerships have to be established and they must include national governments, healthcare providers, and suppliers. They have to pool their insights and expertise as well as their existing design and manufacturing capabilities in their respective markets. These have to include the latest research on the spread of the pandemic as well as regulatory issues that affect the rollout of solutions that are developed.

In Brazil, for example, Flex helped ventilator companies increase capacity from 200 units per month, to 4,000. With the onset of COVID-19, the Brazilian Health Minister announced an initiative to increase the country’s ventilator manufacturing capacity. As the largest electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and contract manufacturing service provider in Brazil, we assembled an expert team that included representatives from government affairs, operations, finance and business development to better understand the needs of each ventilator company. The team spent the first week creating detailed action plans for each company. Magnamed, a family-owned Brazilian ventilator company, quickly became our primary project.

Our full production EMS contract with Magnamed was set to begin on April 1, so we went to work preparing for a totally new product assembly via our Sorocaba site – a top electronics manufacturer in Brazil – but a location that had never produced a medical device.

This was a process that included a partnership with a compressed gas supplier to make the infrastructure changes needed to get a large oxygen tank on site. Then came the creation of the production line, training, and regulatory certification. In under 30 days, the team in Sorocaba went from never having manufactured a medical product, to product completion with regulatory approval. Since then, we shipped 1,000 units in May – and 500 units a week until the end of July totalling 6,500 units.

This wasn’t business as usual but this type of fast-tracked execution is possible with the right amount of collaboration and reach. We’re helping to carry out a number of COVID-19-related projects around the world.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the world in a way that has never been seen before, there’s no way of guaranteeing another pandemic won’t happen again. In fact, epidemiologists are already predicting future events. It’s important that we learn from both the successes and failures from COVID-19. One important lesson is that there’s strength in partnerships and global flexibility. Many organisations have worked together that have never done so before, but it has taken a catastrophic disease to make it happen. For the future, we know tasks can be carried out even quicker by ensuring the lines of communication are open and knowing what is possible by working differently.  

The ultimate goal for COVID-19 is a viable vaccine. Flex is working with customers to produce advanced immunoassay analysers and scale rapidly to the millions of antibody test kits needed to assess clinical trials. As vaccines are validated and COVID-19 is eventually defeated, it will have been the nexus of technology and immense, flexible scale that has brought the solution, and helped battle the virus each step of the way.