‘New normal' as KFI retools, rehires to make medical beds

When the economic fallout from the coronavirus forced thermoformer Kruger Family Industries to furlough 300 workers — or about half the staff at its Wisconsin factories — the company went into overdrive to try to replace that lost work.

Less than a week later, with the country turning convention centers into makeshift hospitals, it thinks it's found a new path: making emergency medical beds.

The Portage, Wis.-based firm is retooling one of its plants from making pickup truck bedliners and auto components to churning out portable, plastic thermoformed emergency and disaster relief beds.

KFI President David Kruger said after the need for job cuts became apparent earlier this year, staff worked quickly to examine the company's skill set, come up with a plan and compress what would normally be a few months of product development into a week.

"This is an eight, 10, 12 week type project that we pulled off in about five days," he said. "We started with a blank piece of paper on Monday. And by Friday afternoon, we had sent purchase orders off for tools to be cut."

"It was lots of long days, lots of long nights," he said.

The company aims to have production going by April 13 and plans to start calling at least some of those furloughed employees back. It's working with mattress makers and metal parts fabricators but will be doing final production in its factory.

Kruger said it's too soon to say how many of the 300 workers, who were let go the week of March 23, could return to the company. But he's hoping that sales grow and many can return.

"Anytime there's a furlough there's sadness," he said. "There's sadness, there's disappointment for me that that's what we've come to with this pandemic."

But the company is glad to be able to offer something that can help, he said. Marketing for the beds kicked off March 30, and Kruger said it's received what it sees as solid interest from health care organizations.

The laid off workers mostly were part of the company's Penda division, which he said is the largest maker of drop-in bedliners for pickup trucks in the world.

When auto plants around the U.S. started shutting down in March, that part of its business dried up.

"At some point, we'll get away from this new normal and back to the old normal," Kruger said. "And so we'll end up making automotive parts again in the near future."

"But this is another product that we can make tomorrow that helps us with the new normal and helps our health care professionals across the United States and across the world with beds for emergency and disaster relief," he said.

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Launching the effort is costing the company about $100,000 to build the first set of molds. It started without any sales contracts.

Production is set to begin with about 300 beds a day but KFI said it could expand tenfold if the sales are there.

Kruger said it's finding a lot of interest as health care facilities try to gear up quickly.

"We've literally just kicked off the sales effort and the response has been [to ask] how quickly can we get the products," he said in a March 30 interview.

"We have requests from hospital distributors, hospitals themselves, governments, nonprofits that are working with governments on disaster relief," he said. "We've actually had questions from people that are in the packaging space but have been asked by their hospital distributor customers if they have access to anybody that may have access to beds."

The beds are not made with any medical certification or approval from the Food and Drug Administration but are manufactured with FDA approved materials and hospital specifications in mind, he said. They are marketed for emergency and disaster relief.

They're made from high density polyethylene, with metal railings and wheels, and a medical grade mattress. The beds are designed to be easily assembled on site and stacked for storage.

While it may seem like a stretch to go from manufacturing pickup bedliners to medical beds, Kruger said the company is drawing from its expertise thermoforming large parts.

Besides the Penda automotive division, KFI's Trienda unit thermoforms industrial material handling pallets and packaging.

That expertise, for example, helped it to design the emergency beds so they could easily nest and stack on top of each other in storage, as it does for its industrial packaging, he said.

And the company has experience making sleeper cabins for tractor-trailer trucks, allowing it to transfer that knowledge to the design of the emergency beds, Kruger said.

"We have a really talented group of engineers and we have a very, very large group of really talented production associates," he said, arguing that in some ways the factory retooling is similar to other large projects it's done.

"We have experience taking brand new projects from ideation all the way through delivery of production," Kruger said. "And this is just another one of those projects as far as we're concerned."

But Kruger may be understating that normality a bit, as he and others in the company focus on the practicalities of executing their plan. Considering that the stakes are fighting the coronavirus and bringing former coworkers back on the job, this one may mean a little more.