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| What did we learn from the "open source ventilator" mess....... |
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| Smokey:
So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options. "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down. That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear. They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get. Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper. Halt production. And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze. Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will. Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application. In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people. |
| EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Smokey on July 09, 2020, 09:55:12 pm ---So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options. "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down. That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear. They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get. Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper. Halt production. And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze. Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will. Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application. In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people. --- End quote --- If you can say that about production stuff, then you can say the same, ever more so, about hastily hacked together solutions. And therein lies a possible problem with the entire concept in the first place. Perhaps it was simply never possible to develop something like this so quickly when a lot of supply chains and production systems of any type were shut, and the product was required to save lives and not take them. |
| tszaboo:
About ramping up production: My experience is, that ramping up some parts of production is not hard. The PnP machine easily can handle larger quantities, more shifts. Same goes for injection moulding. And the manual parts of assembly can be augmented by more people, or smarter organisation. This is usually not the hard part. What I've seen is that the bottleneck is usually the testing of the device. They very likely functionally test each and every ventillator before shipping it. And the test bench of this is going to be the bottleneck. For example, if is possible that they have an artificial lung, government approved, calibrated, specifically designed to test ventilators. And then you need to connect your device to this, and do a x hour burn in test, to avoid early failures, and to prove your device is assembled correctly. Could be two hours, could be 24 hours, who knows? The test length probably was designed to reduce the chance of early failure to the ppm level. And that lung with all the sensors and equipment connected to it is very time consuming to put together, very expensive, and requires exotic parts, that you need to order yourself. And when you order them, they have a lead time. And very expensive. So if you want to just 2x or 3x your throughput, you might just pull in more shifts. But you want x10? Invest hundreds of thousands in equipment, that will just sit there afterwards? Hire people in the middle of the pandemic for a new job to work at night? What if you just run out of factory floor space, because all these require space. Pull up a building next to it? Or assemble medical equipment in tents? |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 10, 2020, 08:30:20 am --- --- Quote from: Smokey on July 09, 2020, 09:55:12 pm ---So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options. "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down. That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear. They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get. Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper. Halt production. And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze. Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will. Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application. In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people. --- End quote --- If you can say that about production stuff, then you can say the same, ever more so, about hastily hacked together solutions. And therein lies a possible problem with the entire concept in the first place. Perhaps it was simply never possible to develop something like this so quickly when a lot of supply chains and production systems of any type were shut, and the product was required to save lives and not take them. --- End quote --- It might have been possible, iff the right skills were available. That means a working team with the specific domain knowledge, implementation skills, manufacturing experience, supply line experience. A group of amateurs was doomed to failure. The American good-ole-boy "its just like shooting swamp rats" attitude is no more than a fantasy. OTOH, the better amateurs were able to help with making things like face masks/visors. Even there I've seen people want to do something without having any clue whether the result would be acceptable and/or usable. |
| EEVblog:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 10, 2020, 09:29:25 am --- --- Quote from: EEVblog on July 10, 2020, 08:30:20 am --- --- Quote from: Smokey on July 09, 2020, 09:55:12 pm ---So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options. "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down. That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear. They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get. Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper. Halt production. And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze. Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will. Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application. In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people. --- End quote --- If you can say that about production stuff, then you can say the same, ever more so, about hastily hacked together solutions. And therein lies a possible problem with the entire concept in the first place. Perhaps it was simply never possible to develop something like this so quickly when a lot of supply chains and production systems of any type were shut, and the product was required to save lives and not take them. --- End quote --- It might have been possible, iff the right skills were available. That means a working team with the specific domain knowledge, implementation skills, manufacturing experience, supply line experience. --- End quote --- You mean like Medtronics and other makers that already had and produced existing working certified designs? ;D |
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