By Gary Hallam, general manager of the Eimo plants in Vicksburg
On Saturday, April 4, I was having a conversation with Hiro Uenishi, CEO of Nissha USA, and he mentioned that it would be a great if Eimo could get involved with helping with the local pandemic response. I immediately sent an email to the Eimo Leadership Team titled “How to help,” asking if anyone had any ideas.
Jim Williams, manager at Eimo Tooling and Technology Center, came back with what looked like a winning idea. Jim is also an instructor at the local community college (KVCC) and he knew that they were already 3-D printing headbands for a face shield and developing a respirator mask. The idea would be for Eimo to mass produce these by quickly making production tooling. We could take this project from prototype stage to mass production in one week. Timing was everything as cases in Michigan were spiking at that time and personal protective equipment (PPE) was a scarcity for local institutions. Jim met with KVCC the morning of 4/6 and by that afternoon the project was a “go”.
Using materials which were already available, the TTC constructed forming and injection tools in five days. On 4/13, our engineering team of Keith Holladay, Jerry Pardeik and Kevin Bell were developing processes for injection molding, vacuum forming, and laser cutting these products. The respirator mask is being formed from Nissha piano black Type P film. Eimo made our first shipment to KVCC on 4/14 and they in turn made their first delivery to Senior Living Centers on 4/17. The production rate has been maintained – 150 face shields and 300 respirators per day.
Eimo has been at work the past six weeks since the state of Michigan stay at home Executive Order. Eimo has been named as an “essential supplier” by over 30 of our critical infrastructure customers.
The East Plant in the Leja Industrial park has been working at almost two thirds of normal capacity supporting primarily two large local medical customers. The Portage Road plant has been running around a third of normal capacity primarily supporting a large defense contract and a couple of smaller medical customers.
The Tech Center on Portage road is operating at about half of normal capacity, primarily supporting the PPE project with KVCC.
It’s definitely a new world. Everyone must wear a face covering and strictly adhere to social distancing which required reconfiguring some workstations. In total, around half of Eimo’s 300 employees remain on the job and we hope to be calling those on temporary furlough back to work as customer demand starts to increase.
At one point we needed to decide if there was a business case to produce items for COVID-19 work, to help increase our revenue, or if this was purely a philanthropic effort.
It was the latter.
But the only cost to Eimo was the time and talent of our staff and we are so proud of their heroic efforts.