As COVID-19 expand­ed beyond Chi­na and into North Amer­i­ca, a short­age of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment (PPE) com­pli­cat­ed the response to the virus — and the efforts of com­pa­nies to pro­tect their employ­ees from its spread. While many busi­ness­es sus­pend­ed plant oper­a­tions and respond­ed to dis­rupt­ed sup­ply chains, a num­ber of oth­ers stepped up and switched their pro­duc­tion lines to make the PPE that is nec­es­sary to pro­tect essen­tial workers. 

ASUG sat down with Dan Dub­blestyne, direc­tor of health, safe­ty, and envi­ron­ment at Wood­bridge Foam Cor­po­ra­tion. The Cana­di­an com­pa­ny lever­aged its facil­i­ties — nor­mal­ly used to man­u­fac­ture prod­ucts for the auto­mo­tive indus­try — to pro­duce N95 masks, all while ensur­ing the safe­ty of its work­ers. We talked about the com­pli­ca­tions asso­ci­at­ed with this piv­ot, as well as how Wood­bridge pulled this tran­si­tion off in such a chal­leng­ing time. 

Jim: Tell me about Wood­bridge Foam cus­tomers and products. 

Dan: Wood­bridge Foam is a pri­vate Cana­di­an com­pa­ny. We oper­ate 50 to 60 facil­i­ties in about 12 coun­tries, all of which large­ly serve the auto­mo­tive mar­ket. We also man­u­fac­ture seat­ing and inte­ri­or parts for bus­es, motor­cy­cles, and golf carts. Our core busi­ness is man­u­fac­tur­ing polyurethane foam prod­ucts, which we can make for any mar­ket that uses polyurethane. We pri­mar­i­ly pro­duce car seats, bol­sters, head­lin­ers, arm­rests, and headrests. 

Jim: What fac­tors went into Woodbridge’s deci­sion to tran­si­tion these plants to pro­duc­ing PPE?

Dan: First of all, Wood­bridge is run as a fam­i­ly busi­ness. The own­ers take the envi­ron­ments and com­mu­ni­ties in which we oper­ate very seri­ous­ly. Back when the virus start­ed to affect North Amer­i­ca, we had already gone through a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion in Chi­na, where we oper­ate a num­ber of man­u­fac­tur­ing sites. In fact, we have two man­u­fac­tur­ing sites in Hubei Province (includ­ing Wuhan), the epi­cen­ter of the Chi­nese out­break. Those were both shut down dur­ing the ini­tial out­break, and all of our team­mates in those two facil­i­ties were put into stricter quar­an­tine than what we’ve expe­ri­enced here. When COVID-19 start­ed to man­i­fest itself here — and it was clear that it was going to have a sig­nif­i­cant impact — the fed­er­al and provin­cial gov­ern­ments start­ed ask­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies to help pro­duce PPE gear. 

We knew right away that if the virus spread the same way here as it did in Chi­na, then PPE was going to be at the fore­front of the pro­to­cols that we would imple­ment to pro­tect our team­mates. We start­ed try­ing to acquire PPE ear­ly on and encoun­tered all kinds of dif­fi­cul­ties because there was a severe short­age. Because of that short­age, the fed­er­al and provin­cial gov­ern­ments were plead­ing with man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies to either donate PPE or retool some of their oper­a­tions to sup­ply front­line work­ers. Then the Auto­mo­tive Parts Man­u­fac­tur­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, which we belong to, approached its mem­bers and encour­aged them to help out. That’s right around when we became involved. At this point, we had idle pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty. So, Wood­bridge decid­ed to pitch in and man­u­fac­ture PPE to address that shortage. 

Jim: What spe­cif­ic types of PPE gear did Wood­bridge produce? 

Dan: We specif­i­cal­ly made face masks. Wood­bridge has a joint ven­ture — one of sev­er­al we main­tain around the world — with a Japan­ese com­pa­ny called INOAC. It had a mask design it had already used in Japan. We col­lab­o­rat­ed to make masks made from polyurethane foam. While this was in our wheel­house, it did require some adjustments. 

Jim: Speak­ing of those adjust­ments, what changes did you have to make in your plants to make this piv­ot work? 

Dan: We found out that not any one plant could do all the work. We had to have one plant pro­duce the foam that would be used to man­u­fac­ture the masks, and then we need­ed anoth­er plant to cut the foam and assem­ble it into the final prod­uct. So, we did have to make some changes to our oper­a­tions. For­tu­nate­ly, we didn’t have to invest sig­nif­i­cant cap­i­tal to retool because a lot of the cut­ting of the foam itself is on a machine called a CNC. These are pro­gram­ma­ble cut­ters. All we need­ed was a design that worked after some minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions — which we had with the INOAC design. Because of the out­break, we called back sev­er­al of our team­mates who were idled and hap­py to come back to work. 

Jim: Was this a dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion for Wood­bridge? How did you over­come the hur­dles asso­ci­at­ed with mak­ing these changes? 

Dan: It was a some­what dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion. When you are man­u­fac­tur­ing a prod­uct that is going on your face and serves a hygien­ic pur­pose, there are stan­dards that must be met. It was nec­es­sary for Wood­bridge to engage with sev­er­al fed­er­al and provin­cial agen­cies and lab­o­ra­to­ries to do test­ing. In order to mar­ket the prod­uct as man­u­fac­tured to the N95 stan­dard and label it as such, you have to meet cer­tain require­ments. For exam­ple, the prod­uct must be ster­il­ized prop­er­ly and to have a degree of resis­tance to liq­uid pen­e­tra­tion. It needs the abil­i­ty to fil­ter cer­tain sizes of par­ti­cles. We had to do test­ing to meet these required stan­dards before we could even start manufacturing. 

The gov­ern­ment itself opened a lot of doors for us. It was eager to help us tran­si­tion and man­u­fac­ture the masks, once we con­vinced it that we could do so. Some of those hur­dles that could nor­mal­ly take months or years end­ed up not being that dif­fi­cult to overcome. 

Jim: Did the plant work­ers need extra train­ing to make this change hap­pen? And how did you con­duct that? 

Dan: There was some extra train­ing that was required for the plant work­ers. This was a new prod­uct, so there were qual­i­ty inspec­tions that need­ed to be done. Fol­low­ing estab­lished train­ing guide­lines, we put togeth­er online train­ing pro­grams that iden­ti­fied how the man­u­fac­tur­ing would be accom­plished in a safe and con­sis­tent man­ner. We need­ed to ensure that our team­mates were all meet­ing and under­stand­ing the stan­dards. This helped us make sure we were deliv­er­ing a prod­uct that met all of the require­ments consistently. 

Jim: How does Wood­bridge pro­tect the safe­ty of its employ­ees who are work­ing dur­ing the pandemic? 

Dan: That is a sto­ry with­in itself. Because we had facil­i­ties in Wuhan that had imple­ment­ed pan­dem­ic response pro­to­cols, we learned a lot from their expe­ri­ence. We also did a lot of bench­mark­ing and looked at what oth­er com­pa­nies were doing. Because of what we had gone through before with SARS and H1N1, we already had some tools at our dis­pos­al, includ­ing some­thing called a Pan­dem­ic Response Tool­box. We also devel­oped, dis­trib­uted, and imple­ment­ed a Safe Work Play­book that includ­ed the pro­to­cols around tem­per­a­ture and facil­i­ty access screen­ing, wear­ing PPE, per­son­al hygiene, the report­ing and track­ing of cas­es, and case response and containment. 

Wood­bridge also had an exec­u­tive-lev­el pan­dem­ic response team that was meet­ing dai­ly. We essen­tial­ly imple­ment­ed the play­book in a very con­trolled man­ner and made sure that all of our plants were up to speed through dai­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We under­went a lot of engi­neer­ing changes. For exam­ple, some jobs required peo­ple to work shoul­der-to-shoul­der. So, where we could, we installed phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers. We adopt­ed many oth­er mea­sures, too. We’re very hap­py with the out­put because among about 7,500 team­mates glob­al­ly, we had few­er cas­es report­ed than expected.

Jim: When did you start this tran­si­tion, and when did you con­vert back to nor­mal production? 

Dan: We’re still not back to full, nor­mal pro­duc­tion. All our plants are back up and run­ning, with some at a reduced capac­i­ty. Most of our man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties start­ed back up in late April or ear­ly May. But the pro­duc­tion vol­umes are off. 

Not all our cus­tomers are back to run­ning at 100%. They’ve been affect­ed across the entire sup­ply chain on a scale nobody has ever expe­ri­enced before. We’re not quite sure when we’re going to get back to nor­mal, but we’re start­ing to see some light at the end of the tun­nel. I should men­tion that it’s like­ly most of the pro­to­cols we have in place are going to car­ry over well into 2021.

Have you upgrad­ed your sup­ply chain tech­nol­o­gy stack, nav­i­gat­ed an SAP S/4HANA migra­tion, or solved an oper­a­tional busi­ness chal­lenge through tech­nol­o­gy or process improve­ments? Your peers are eager to learn from your expe­ri­ence at the upcom­ing ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Sup­ply Chain vir­tu­al con­fer­ence on May 11 – 12, 2021. Sub­mit your pre­sen­ta­tion abstract for an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share your SAP journey.