Doing what needs to be done: Kent Elastomer plays key role in UK ventilator project

Mike Barlow doesn't believe in impossible. Not anymore.

Because this year, he watched the impossible become reality.

Until this spring, Penlon Ltd. wasn't in the emergency ventilator business. But at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when ventilators were desperately needed, Penlon found a way to make them. What seemed insurmountable, Barlow said, was possible because of support from partners like Kent Elastomer Products Inc., which made bellows — thousands of them — faster than anyone thought possible.

"We saved lives," Barlow, materials manager at Penlon, said of the collaboration among Penlon, KEP and others. "We will tell our grandchildren about this."

As COVID-19 spread across Europe and the number of hospitalizations climbed, the United Kingdom government issued the Ventilator Challenge U.K. to its manufacturing base, urging the development and production of much-needed medical equipment.

Barlow said Penlon was uniquely positioned to meet the challenge because of the work it already did. With some changes to the schematics, the anesthesia systems it regularly produces could be redesigned and used as critically needed ventilators.

Within a week, the company not only drew up plans for a new ventilator — the Penlon ESO 2 — by adapting one of its anesthesia systems, but also it created a prototype. And after a month, Penlon received certification from the proper governmental authorities and was poised to produce tens of thousands of ventilators.

The initial goal was to make about 30,000 machines in three months, and the project brought together suppliers as well as OEMs in the automotive and aerospace sectors. Ford U.K., McLaren Racing Ltd., Airbus SE and Siemens AG all joined the effort to ensure that the ventilator project had the manpower and manufacturing space for the ventilators to be built quickly and precisely.

"We were doing things in a matter of hours or minutes rather than in days or weeks," Barlow said. "It [seemed] impossible from the start, like it could not be done. That was the only way you could really think about it. But, in reality, it had to be done. The reason it did happen was that it was a common goal for everyone. We were facing a crisis and people were dying, and every device we were making could potentially save lives."

Pumping life into this collaborative effort — one that included some of the world's biggest companies — was a midsized rubber products maker from the heartland of Ohio.

Kent Elastomer Products, a subsidiary of Meridian Industries Inc. located about 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, is no stranger to manufacturing lifesaving products. After all, medical products constitute roughly 85 percent of the company's overall business. But this moment was different, according to Joe Williamson, KEP vice president of sales and marketing.

There was an urgency to the moment that called the company to take its services to a new level and expand collaborative efforts. For KEP, that meant stepping up big for a customer that typically accounted for a small part of the business.

"When Mike brought these volumes to us, [we thought] this is insane," Williamson said. "We do 50 [bellows] a month for you guys, about 600 a year. How can we produce 30,000-35,000 within a three-month period?"

A number of factors allowed KEP to quickly transition and produce the thousands of bellows needed for the ventilators — about 15,000 in all, once the project was said and done. Most prominent, Williamson said, was the dedication of the entire KEP team and their determination to prove the impossible was possible.

"They were so resilient," Williamson said. "When their backs were up against the wall and they were facing the unknowns of COVID ... they stepped up their game and put all hands on deck."

Another reason KEP could accommodate the incredible surge in product demand was the shift in demand elsewhere. While a large portion of the products made by KEP are for the medical sector, not all of them were needed when COVID-19 took hold. Hospitals, to ensure they had the space and resources to treat COVID-19 patients, halted elective surgeries and other nonessential medical procedures. That led a drop in demand for some medical products.

In KEP's case, that turned out to be a small blessing. It meant dip production lines could be converted and resources redirected to get the tooling in place and produce the bellows in the quantity that Penlon needed.

What KEP achieved is astounding, said Barlow, who emphasized the pace at which KEP turned around the custom tooling for the bellows. Project leaders collaborated to make it all happen, working late nights and weekends, expanding the lines of communication.

"The major impact is that we get it done now," Barlow said. "There isn't time to contemplate if there is a problem. We hit the problem straight on, and we solve it in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days or weeks."

What Penlon and its partners achieved cannot be understated, Barlow said. Together, they took a project that should have taken 18 months or longer and turned it into a project easily measured in weeks. Working with that kind of timeline wasn't easy, Barlow said, but it was necessary.

"We saved lives," Barlow said. "At the moments when things were really tough — and they were really tough often — I just thought, 'There is a family somewhere in the country, sitting around having dinner that would otherwise be mourning the death of someone at that table.' That was my motivation for keeping going. We got despondent, but we never got angry. We always managed to figure out solutions."