Name: GM quietly helped company set up ventilator assembly line after a cold call
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GM quietly helped company set up ventilator assembly line after a cold call

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Detroit Free Press Bob Hamilton had a favor to ask, and he knew it was unreasonable and&nbsp;almost bordered on requiring an apology&nbsp;for being so bold."To be honest, I don't have anything to compare it to," he said of his audacious request.&nbsp;Hamilton picked up the phone in Reno, Nevada, to cold call&nbsp;General Motors in Detroit. His work involved health care, not cars, and&nbsp;he saw press reports that GM during the auto industry shutdown was&nbsp;making emergency equipment for hospitals battling the highly infectious respiratory disease COVID-19.This is the story of a man who wanted to&nbsp;help&nbsp;Americans in trouble, a vague&nbsp;idea of how to make it happen&nbsp;and&nbsp;powerful&nbsp;motivation after&nbsp;watching&nbsp;the deadly coronavirus paralyze&nbsp;Europe and spread to&nbsp;America.But all Hamilton&nbsp;had was a warehouse,&nbsp;a dusty old space of 90,000 square feet, and it needed to be&nbsp;transformed into a manufacturing facility. As CEO of Hamilton Medical Inc., the 43-year-old executive simply didn't have the skill or training to make it happen.His parent company, founded by his father and based in Bonaduz, Switzerland, &nbsp;was swamped making high-tech hospital ventilators for hard-hit Europeans. No one was available to fly to the U.S. to help. Grounded airplanes and international flight restrictions created more&nbsp;insurmountable barriers.Enter Ronda Uhl,&nbsp;an accomplished engineer who started her career on a factory floor and led the rapid response team in&nbsp;Reno.Their team effort,&nbsp;now realized, will in the end save thousands of&nbsp;lives.Just as&nbsp;Arizona and Texas and Florida&nbsp;are seeing new spikes in coronavirus cases and increased hospitalizations, Hamilton Medical&nbsp;is on track to craft by hand its target of 25,000&nbsp;ventilators for medical use that can cost health care facilities more than $10,000 apiece.The goal is to build one every 45 minutes, from start to finish.&nbsp;"You have to recognize the level of complexity," Hamilton said."This is for putting people on a ventilator, with complicated pumps and sensors and little screws. This is very precise and regimented components that go into these machines. Just the training to put this all together. ... These are made to protect patients' lungs, which are fragile. Ramping up production on such a technical device was only possible with the assistance of General Motors' army."It&nbsp;was during this time period that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan made national headlines with&nbsp;her pleas for ventilators."Michigan has 1,700 ventilators — critical equipment to help people breathe — but needs 5,000 to 10,000 more," wrote the Associated Press&nbsp;on March 30, quoting Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive, Michigan&nbsp;Health and Human Services. "Federal Emergency Management Agency sent 400 due to arrive ... The state is procuring 2,000 from other sources."The effort to find critical lifesaving breathing machines was so dire that a Detroit ER .In just four to five weeks, Hamilton Medical went&nbsp;from&nbsp;being a wholly owned subsidiary, a distributor, to a manufacturer."That&nbsp;generally takes, like, two or three years," Bob Hamilton said, explaining that the parent company&nbsp;does design, research, development and manufacturing."We exceeded the specs for medical production," he&nbsp;said. "We've had an army, if you will, descend upon and enable us to do something we never thought possible. They came in with a plan. We had the ambition but not the plan."How this all unfolded sounds, well, unbelievable."This has, for me, been like a crash course in brain surgery," Hamilton said.But first, let's back up a minute.The call came three months ago, on March 24."We had an open discussion with Bob Hamilton involving five or six of us from GM. Bob didn't have many people and he told us what he wanted to do," said Peter Thom, 57, global vice president of manufacturing engineering at GM. "This was basically project management. We&nbsp;have no medical skills. What Hamilton wanted was to put down a production line to go build some ventilators."But this didn't require inventing anything from scratch."You take a Swiss operation that had already increased production a bit and put it down in a shed in Reno," Thom said. "That's what we can do. We build a full-size truck every 60 seconds with the (Chevy) Silverado."So he called&nbsp;Uhl. She made it all happen."This isn't something where a boss can stand over you. We knew someone had to go but we all couldn't because of the travel restrictions," Thom said. "We charged Ronda with setting up a team with people she knew and trusted. I called her and said, 'Here's the challenge we have.' "Within 24 hours, the team&nbsp;had a game plan.&nbsp;"We had been in COVID response mode for about a week and already had people starting to work with Ventec on a mask line in Warren," said Thom, who lives in Birmingham.&nbsp;"We decided we could figure it out."So Uhl hopped on a plane. And she stayed in Reno for up to four weeks at a time, coming home permanently only recently."When Peter Thom contacted me, he said&nbsp;they have another ventilator project but, as far as a manufacturing facility, it's nothing more really than a shed," Uhl said.Making everything happen fell squarely on her shoulders."We were working seven days a week to get this up and running," she said. "It's about how quickly can we get these ventilators into the hands of people who need them, get them to the front line. Typically, we were starting between 6 and 7 in the morning and ending between 5 or 6 at night. By then we were exhausted."This is a woman&nbsp;who earned engineering degrees at Kettering University and Stanford.Uhl, 47, is a fourth-generation GM employee&nbsp;from Sterling Heights whose father marketed Chevy trucks. She started out&nbsp;as a&nbsp;line supervisor in assembly plants in&nbsp;Doraville, Georgia, and Detroit-Hamtramck, then went on to a&nbsp;role&nbsp;deciding what future vehicles would be built where, which is called manufacturing allocation. Uhl spent nine years on a&nbsp;tour of duty through Asia, specifically&nbsp;Seoul, South Korea, and Shanghai, China — where GM has a strong presence with its Cadillac brand.And now she is manufacturing chief engineer for luxury vehicles&nbsp;at GM.Uhl is an avid skier who had to unwind after long hours by&nbsp;running along the streets of Reno because the slopes were closed in Nevada. She said she was eager to get back to her son and husband after being gone for big blocks&nbsp;of time.More:More:"Nobody from Switzerland could come," she said. "So they asked GM if we could go in and set up the manufacturing site. Peter said, 'This is a long shot. I'm not sure it's going to go anywhere. But go ahead and take a look.' "She never looked back."It's like we had a mobilized infantry come in," said Hamilton,&nbsp;whose&nbsp;uncle and grandfather&nbsp;worked for a GM parts distribution center in Sparks, Nevada, back in the day.Hamilton said shipments of ventilators are&nbsp;reaching thousands this month, and being sent to priority sites determined by the federal government.As the health crisis continues to unfold, GM&nbsp;withdrew its presence from Reno in June and handed off responsibility&nbsp;for the project. Production had doubled. A&nbsp;third line was scheduled for mid-July.&nbsp;Dr. Anthony&nbsp;Fauci, White House coronavirus adviser,&nbsp;testified to Congress this week: "We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around, and so I am very concerned."More:More:In response to the urgency and the desire to help find solutions during this pandemic, all of GM's work related to the project was donated for this project.President Donald Trump emphasized&nbsp;the need for companies to rapidly respond to the manufacturing&nbsp;crisis. The U.S. government&nbsp;contracted for ventilators under the Defense Production Act, and Hamilton eventually received an order from the Federal Emergency Management Agency&nbsp;for ventilators.Tony Bucchi, 30, of Lake Orion, was part of the GM team that developed the assembly line in Reno, the physical tooling and tables needed and line flow. He was also part of the team that worked with actual employees to figure out what works and what doesn't."We were developing what we thought the assembly line should look like even before we got to Nevada," Bucchi said. "If Plan A doesn't work, we had a Plan B and Plan C and Plan D and Plan E. But Plan A worked."For him, the COVID-19 project started with an 11 a.m. call on a Sunday.As part of&nbsp;a third-generation GM family, Bucchi&nbsp;just joined the company a year ago after working as a manufacturing engineer for a plastic injection molding shop. "My grandfather was a line worker at the Baltimore Assembly Plant. He built Astro Vans."

Detroit Free Press Bob Hamilton had a favor to ask, and he knew it was unreasonable and&nbsp;almost bordered on requiring an apology&nbsp;for being so bold."To be honest, I don't have anything to compare it to," he said of his audacious request.&nbsp;Hamilton picked up the phone in Reno, Nevada, to cold call&nbsp;General Motors in Detroit. His work involved health care, not cars, and&nbsp;he saw press reports that GM during the auto industry shutdown was&nbsp;making emergency equipment for hospitals battling the highly infectious respiratory disease COVID-19.This is the story of a man who...

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Phoebe Wall Howard

The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, US. The Sunday edition is titled the Sunday Free Press. It is sometimes referred to as the Freep (reflected in the paper's web address, www.freep.com). It primarily serves Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston, Washtenaw, and Monroe counties.  The Free Press is also the largest city newspaper owned by Gannett, which also publishes USA Today. The Free Press has received ten Pulitzer Prizes and four Emmy Awards. Its motto is "On Guard for 189 Years".

GM quietly helped company set up ventilator assembly line after a cold call

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