7. Using the DENSO Spirit to Make Breathing Easy, Safe During COVID
Coming Together to Make Respirators for Ford
During the early days of COVID-19 in March 2020, Patrick O’Brien put his hand up, agreeing to recruit DENSO Manufacturing Michigan, Inc. (DMMI) co-workers and associates to support a joint venture with DENSO International America (DIAM) and Ford. Their objective: quickly support design, sourcing and manufacturing lifesaving powered air purifying respirators (PAPR) to be worn by frontline healthcare workers.
At that point in time, O’Brien, Senior Manager for HVAC Operations, couldn’t have foreseen the long hours the work was going to require. He wasn’t thinking about the difficulty of gathering a team willing to come into work, since everyone already had been sent home with pay. And he certainly wasn’t thinking about his team winning awards for their efforts.
He simply was thinking about the added protection those respirators could give to area healthcare professionals in caring for other essential workers, his friends, his associates and his family.
“It was a scary time. We didn’t know much about COVID, and the associates were at home unsure of their safety and their jobs,” he said. “I called associates who had been at DENSO in our HVAC assembly process, those who had high levels of dexterity and assembly skills.”
“I told them they could be part of a big project that protects lives. I told them that we had an opportunity to do something that’s never been done before. And they were all in, they chose to come in,” he said quietly.
Instead of staying home, sheltering with family and awaiting the outcome of the pandemic, the associates came to the DMMI plant ready to work. The team went from prototype to running mass production in three weeks.
“We were running two shifts close to the end of the project. We had one process, two lines, approximately 25 people per shift, and we went like that full speed,” he said. Over a span of approximately 25 days, hundreds of DENSO associates quickly brought the medical-grade personal protection equipment to mass production.
“It was crazy. It was inspirational. We created a neat environment for them, with happy music, box lunches with good brownies (the kind with the filling in it!) or really good catered pizza. And we worked hard. We knew it was for the greater good,” O’Brien said.
His particular group put together the respirator case with the blower motor inside, at times adapting their process to ensure the parts sealed properly. “We assembled that as a final product before shipping to Ford, where they would put on the hose, battery pack and hood,” he said.
Without the strong support of all DMMI functional groups collaboratively working together, this project couldn’t have been imaginable.
On his desk at work, O’Brien now proudly displays a picture of the hundreds of associates who comprised that DENSO Respirator Project Team.
In November 2021, the joint team of Ford Motor Company and DENSO received an Automotive Innovation Award from the Society of Plastics Engineers’ (SPE) Automotive Division. For nearly 50 years, the SPE Automotive Innovation Awards Program has been one of the world's most prestigious and largest competitions of its kind.
In the awards announcement, Sergio Pujols, DENSO Vice President of Energy Management Engineering, lauded the associates’ hard work, saying “because of their DENSO Spirit, they helped us realize one of our core goals: contributing to a better world for all.”