Couple of weeks out
before lockdown,
it was obvious this is going
to happen pretty quickly.
We could see this whole
ventilator shortage emerging,
and government began to say
that it might need some help.
It was all about pace.
We need ventilators,
and we need them fast.
But we knew that was going
to be a huge challenge.
My name's Dick Elsy.
I'm the chief exec of the
UK's High Value Manufacturing
Catapult. At the heart of
what we do in our centres is
bring companies together.
You've got Rolls Royce for
their aero engines, Airbus
with some of their
fantastic products.
There's really a very,
very strong thread
of advanced manufacturing
technology in the UK.
The quickest approach would be
to get a hold of an existing
ventilator specification.
We chose a unit coming
out of Smiths Industries,
and the other device was
a full intensive care unit
from a company called Penlon.
It seemed like an
easy choice to make,
to support a proven ventilator.
We knew we had to
scale up 50 a week
to something like
1,500 a week or more.
In the first sort
of two or three,
certainly, three weeks,
the core executive team
had pulled all of it together.
We were working 18
to 20 hours a day.
We started off using Zoom.
But then all that sort of
baggage about Zoom security
came into the fore.
So we flicked across
to Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams being
absolutely invaluable
as a collaboration tool.
It saved us so much time.
It's amazing how everybody
has just adapted to it really
quickly.
It's a very intuitive
thing to use.
It's so easy to just
jump on a team's call
and share your document
just in real time.
The collaboration and team
spirit and stop-at-nothing
culture was quite--
well, was and still
is-- quite extraordinary.
Everybody has got
that singular purpose
at the forefront of their mind.
And having that clear purpose,
the typical boundaries
that you have when
you're working
with a number of
different companies
have completely disappeared.
We had started to
consider how on Earth we
could train lots of
people in parallel
to the production happening
at both Smiths and Penlon.
We quickly realised that the
Microsoft HoloLens 2's could be
used with the remote assist
capability in order to get that
expertise and knowledge out
of these guys who have been
building ventilators
for many, many years.
At the moment, I can tell you we
are meeting the demand signals
with what we're supplying.
We've achieved an
enormous amount
in an incredibly
short space of time.
One of my colleagues
said to me, he
said, hey, Dick,
you know, look--
look at what we've achieved.
He said, imagine if we could
work like this all the time.
So extraordinary, extraordinary.