British manufacturers unite to build ventilators for the NHS

As the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic began to be felt around the world, leaders at the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) realised it would need to play a role in addressing a major impediment in the UK’s response to the virus: the shortage of hospital-grade ventilators. 

In response, it launched the VentilatorChallengeUK. The consortium that was subsequently created comprised 33 world-leading manufacturers, including Ford, Airbus, McLaren, Siemens Healthineers, Rolls Royce and GKN Aerospace, along with key Microsoft partners including Accenture, Avanade, PTC, Content & Cloud (formally IT Labs) and ZenZero. 

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Extraordinary collaboration 

Dick Elsy is the Chief Executive of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult. He explains that the work presented serious challenges, especially around the scale of the collaboration required.   

Production would need to scale up from 50 a week to 1,500 a week or more – placing a huge stretch on existing supply chains.   

To support this collaboration, the VentilatorChallengeUK team used Microsoft Teams: “It’s a very intuitive thing to use,” says Elsy, “It’s amazing how everybody just adapted to it really quickly and it’s just become part of our project life.” 

“It’s been absolutely invaluable as a collaboration tool. It saved so much time and confusion,” agrees Laura Shrieves, Head of Systems Engineering – Training Solutions at Thales, one of the participating engineering companies. 

Remote training and expert guidance  

Another major challenge for the consortium was around how to train hundreds of workers across different assembly sites and companies to manufacture and assemble Penlon and Smiths ventilators. This challenge was made worse by the travel and social distancing restrictions in place during the pandemic.      

To overcome these difficulties, the consortium chose to extensively use Microsoft HoloLens 2 with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to deliver immediate expert guidance from the manufacturers. Further support was delivered using PTC Vuforia Expert Capture for step-by-step training. 

“We quickly realized that the HoloLens 2 could be used with the remote assist capability in order to get expertise and knowledge out of Smiths and Penlon, who have been building ventilators for many years. This was one of the big advantages,” says Shrieves.  

A “stop at nothing” culture 

“The collaboration and team spirit and ‘stop at nothing’ culture was – and still is – quite extraordinary,” says Dick Elsy. “At the moment I can tell you that we are meeting the demand signals with what we’re supplying … What we’re building now is for greater resilience, which is a really good thing.  To see a wagonload of ventilators leaving the site off to the distribution centre is a really uplifting thing.” 