Lean manufacturing thrives amid coronavirus crisis

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A lean cell is configured to produce a field hospital cot about every 30 seconds. PioneerIWS workstations give assemblers quick access to tools and components. Being in quarantine, Eddie Wengerd had time on his hands. He had returned from the MODEX material handling tradeshow in Atlanta and was notified that someone at the event had tested positive for COVID-19. Eddie is general manager of Dalton, Ohio-based Pioneer, an Amish company that specializes in a small niche in the ag market that the plain community knows better than anyone: horse-drawn farm equipment. Powered off the grid by a natural gas generator, the operation has all the technology of a modern fab shop. The organization also has embraced lean manufacturing and has even designed flexible workstations that it now sells under the Gridlok and Flexturs brands through its subsidiary, Pioneer Industrial Workflow Solutions. When Eddie and his brother Steven, director of sales, returned from the tradeshow and learned they were exposed to COVDI-10, the two quarantined themselves for 14 days, but they spent that time wisely. One day Eddie showed his brother a newspaper article about how the country was running out of hospital beds, and the need for field hospital cots was exploding . “That’s when his mind started spinning.” So said Leon Wengerd, Pioneer’s CFO, who explained that at the tradeshow both Eddie and Steven met someone from the Lyon Group in Chicago who had connections throughout the medical supply chain. All the pieces of the puzzle—sales and distribution, local manufacturing collaborators, and lean production—seemed to be in place. Could it work? The world needs more field hospital cots now amid the coronavirus pandemic. Could Pioneer and its partners provide them? As Leon recounted, “Within a few days we developed a prototype in SolidWorks. The next day we had […]