The UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) realised it would need to play a role in addressing a major impediment in the UK’s response to the COVID-19: the shortage of hospital-grade ventilators. It launched the Ventilator Challenge UK. The consortium that was subsequently created comprised 33 world-leading manufacturers, including Ford, Airbus, McLaren, Siemens Healthineers, Rolls Royce and GKN Aerospace, along with key Microsoft partners including Accenture, Avanade, PTC, Content & Cloud (formally IT Labs) and ZenZero.
Production would need to scale up from 50 a week to 1,500 a week or more - placing a huge stretch on existing supply chains. In addition, employees across the country and work sites would have to be quickly trained. To overcome these difficulties, the consortium chose to extensively use Microsoft HoloLens 2 with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to deliver immediate expert guidance from the manufacturers. Further support was delivered using PTC Vuforia Expert Capture for step-by-step training.
