Dick Elsy leads the magnificently named High Value Manufacturing Catapult, a group of manufacturing research centres in the UK which brings companies together to help them bring new technology to market and at scale. The ideal choice therefore to lead The UK Ventilator Challenge to bring, with urgency, unprecedented numbers of additional ventilators through to the NHS to meet the Covid-19 emergency.

Dick’s interview with Justin Webb on BBC R4 Today (23/4/20) was a little gem, encapsulating within a few short minutes a gold standard for organisational efficiency and success. The key parts are transcribed here.

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

BBC R4 Today

23/4/20


Justin Webb (JW): How certain aspects of the way we operate are going to be changed by Coronavirus, and perhaps for good – and not necessarily for the worst. First up manufacturing. What are the lessons in the way that firms come together and build more ventilators for instance. And for the way we face business challenges.

Dick Elsy (DE) is on the line, who leads “The Ventilator Challenge” – the UK consortium – and is also Chief Executive of The High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

JW: Give us a sense first, before we go into the wider question of what’s going on with the ventilators and your successes and where the difficulties have been – what’s actually happening?

DE: Well I lead the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, which brings companies together to help them bring new technology to market, so our core is a process of collaboration with companies using our research capabilities to scale up new manufacturing technologies. And that’s been at the heart of why we’ve stepped in to lead the UK Ventilator Challenge to help bring a whole load of new/more ventilators through to the NHS.

(JW): Give us an update. What have you managed to do?

(DE): Well, in the last five weeks since the consortium formed we’ve got behind two existing ventilator manufacturers and we’re basically super-scaling the manufacture of that. So typically the two companies make about 250 ventilators a week between them and we’re going to super-scale that to well over 1500 units a week and we’ve built seven new production facilities in parallel with the two productions. One’s at Smiths Industries and the other’s at a company called Penlon. So we’ve build seven new production facilities separate to those. We’ve procured over 11 million parts to build them and this week we’re starting a serious scale up process.

JW: Right, OK. Think about what you have done and how realistically, hand on heart, when you look to the longer term future - five years, ten years, how that might change the approach in manufacturing. But also I suppose more widely in business.

DE: Well for those of us who’ve been involved, we’ve compressed probably 18 months – two years of effort into four or five weeks. I think most of us would describe it as a life-changing experience. And we’ve been able to do this because at the heart of what we’ve been doing is a bunch of really capable engineers. And engineers – when you put them together – will naturally collaborate and create a culture of quick decision making - no waste - a total focused “can do attitude.” And we’ve found that’s been really infectious – it’s spread around the rest of the team. We even had lawyers doing complex agreements and getting them done in a matter of hours.

JW:   That’s interesting. I wonder if one of the things that we’ve learned – or that you’ve learned – it’s just speed actually. We don’t need to prevaricate perhaps as much as we often do.

DE:   Well we’ve asked ourselves that! We’ve been working 20 hours a day, which isn’t sustainable. But we’ve asked ourselves why can’t we work like this all the time? And we’ve realised that in our daily business life there’s an awful lot of noise and waste. And basically when you’re faced with a huge challenge – and a huge national responsibility like this – which is very focusing – you’ve just got to get rid of all of that noise and waste. And we’ve found that the spirit of collaboration has been quite extraordinary. Many of these people that have come together have never even met in person because we’ve been on lockdown. Most of us have been running this whole thing from a laptop in our studies.

JW: What proportion of meetings can be done away with long term?

DE: (Laughing): Well our meetings last a maximum of about 15 minutes. They are very focused. They are around the business. There’s no frills or anything associated with them. Absolutely focused on the mission. And there is a big learning point from that. We do fill our lives with an awful lot of noise. And when you strip it all out it’s actually quite energising. And we’ve found we’ve managed to achieve a huge amount with little noise, being really focused. I guess the other thing as well, Justin is empowering people to get on with the job. That’s been really key to what we’ve been doing. Allowing teams to self-organise based on their capability rather than being a command and control structure.