PANDEMIC!   Manufacturing Reboot! (tm)

PENN STATION, HOW US MANUFACTURERS ARE STEPPING UP TO BEAT THE CORONA VIRUS 

by Patricia E. Moody

The Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal

Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.

     When we came back that Sunday night in February from New York City by way of Penn Station, the world was clear and shining.  The trains were filled.  The NY restaurants, Manhatta and The Palm, were glorious and expensive – no one cared about the lines or the tab.   Although temperatures hovered in the thirties, the city was gloriously walkable, filled with choices, seemingly paralyzing choices – should we hit the Met or walk down the waterfront to visit The Intrepid?  Or should we try the coffee shop across from  the Print Museum?  Life! The only limits ahead were the train schedule and our credit cards. 

But one day later the rent came due.  What seemed like the beginnings of a small head cold, sniffles and a few sneezes, within hours morphed into an annoying headache, swollen glands, then total body pain – even my hair hurt -  raging fever and uncontrollable shivers and chills. I waited it out, but by Tuesday it was clear that my body was overtaken.  I texted a friend, “I feel like I have been hit by a truck and I’m dying, but I don’t care.”

          Still, after having had the yearly flu shot and two weeks later contracted the flu,  I didn’t understand -  this didn’t make sense.  But by Thursday it was clear that this “flu”             was something else.  The Urgent Care doc recommended tamiflu, warning that it would have been more effective had I visited three days earlier, but by then the                         symptoms had overtaken my body and I was immobilized.  I called it “The Penn Station Flu,” dedicated to all the rolled up, seemingly lifeless bodies we had seen lying                 about the train station floor and waiting rooms and sidewalks and walkways, and the feces smeared bathroom. 

         Recovery was slow and jagged.  As a cancer survivor I am more careful than I used to be – I take those effing anti-cancer pills, am disciplined about the Dukan high-                 protein, low carb/low sugar diet, and visit the gym daily.  I’m doing everything I can to stay standing, but I have to say based on my experience with The Penn Station Flu             that it wasn’t enough.

A slow and pained recovery

And, as US manufacturing has quickly discovered, everything we’ve been doing for the past 50 years, at least since my father lifted me up to look into the pulper in the St. Regis paper mill where he worked, and since I walked into a steel mill for my first consulting engagement – after 10 years of working in high tech and low manufacturing -  all the fascination with the beginnings of computer systems, the World War II-born Toyota and lean obsessions, and now the challenge of IT integration and robotics, just weren’t enough to take us safely through this terrible illness.  Although I’ve highlighted some of the best of the best examples of companies, typically small to mid-size businesses, whose blood flows with ferocious dedication to ALL their manufacturing challenges – companies like Grand Rapids’ Firstronic, Kent Bikes, Precision Polymers, and others, all of whom we first featured, and all of whom later won Industry Week’s Best Plants Awards - we haven’t settled on the right tamiflu for this illness, and we sure as hell don’t know when the fix will kick in.

But, my fellow manufacturing friends, we do have a few models, examples of these companies doing the right thing, being creative and relentless, as they were wont to do pre-pandemic, and we would like to bring you these examples of rising strength and positive direction.

It’s the least we can do in memory of all those who preceded us, the mill girls who stood six days a week at their looms in dusty airless brick mills, the shoe workers like my mother who ruined their hands and their eyesight hammering heels on shoes – tap…tap, tap, tap… piece work -  so that she could buy hamburger and white bread for the whole family, the geeks and commandos and C-suite guys who tried to put it all together.

It’s the least we can do.

To show you these brave and completely driven come-back companies, we’re starting with John Sammut, CEO and President of Grand Rapids’ Firstronic.  We asked Sammut the three questions that we think cover US industry’s current feverish dilemma. 

We will follow up this leadership take on the pandemic with more answers from our star list, other leaders working the problem, including:

*         a high volume supplier to Walmart and other big box stores that has had to go back to baseline and re-direct its team

*         a wild and crazy engineer entrepreneur (also a cancer survivor, fresh out of the hospital) starting up new production, new lines, and new medical products in Brooklyn, in TWO weeks

*          one of two remaining US glove manufacturers struggling with sudden and unexpected demand

*           an old-time food producer that reinvented its line to crank out much-needed pandemic products

*         the CEO of a leading non-profit manufacturing group

*         GM

• *         Cirtronics, a New Hampshire sub-contract manufacturer that never shut down and had to boot up in the midst of rising customer demand and a tricky supply chain

*         and a shining, perfect, energized precision manufacturing company that just added customer turmoil to its watch list. 

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    1. Firstronic, How One US Electronics Producer Is Fighting – Mid-Pandemic -  to Get Back

    2.  Kent International,  Steering Clear

    3. Kim Humphrey, CEO, Assn. for Mfg Excellence

    4. The Glove Story, How One of the TWO Remaining US Nitrile Glove Manufacturers Is Stepping Up to the Pandemic Challenge

     5.  Cirtronics - UPDATE 8/26/20 - Four Questions with Cirtronics CEO Dave Patterson - from Target On-line https://www.ame.org/target/articles/2020/four-questions-cirtronics-ceo-dave-patterson 

6. US Automakers Plant Re-openings In the US' Biggest Economic Sector

      7.  ThomasNet.com guide to reopening manufacturing, including federal and state protocol guidelines.  CLICK here.  Includes list of  158 suppliers of ventilation, purifying and cleaning systems services.