How Ventilators Helped GM Build The Hummer EV

In the early days of the pandemic in March 2020, hospitals were running out of critical care ventilators that thousands of Covid-19 patients needed. Ventilator manufacturers couldn’t make more fast enough. Hospitals were having to weigh which patients would get the life-saving equipment, which “forced some states to consider enacting ‘crisis standards of care,’” rationing medical care, per NPR at the time.

In a race against the virus, General Motors partnered with Ventec Life Systems to build ventilators and help save lives, retooling factories in Indiana on a dime. Ultimately, GM and Ventec produced 30,000 ventilators between March 20, 2020 and August 30^th, 2020, producing “one ventilator about every seven minutes,” with a $490 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services under the Defense Production Act. GM also produced tens of thousands of surgical masks.

How did they do it?

Telva McGruder, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at General Motors and a 28-year veteran of GM, “was leading facility engineering and facility management for North America…We had shut down our facilities. We were working on developing protocols for how to bring our team members back to work safely,” she explained on my Electric Ladies Podcast recently. “And then I walked into a meeting with our manufacturing leadership team and they said our country has a need for ventilators and we're going to try to figure out how to help. And with that, we were off to the races and we started looking at options for facilities that we could use to do it.”

Never having produced anything remotely resembling ventilators before, it was all hands on deck. “We had people working weekends going in, scouting out facilities, seeing what was possible, what wasn't possible, in spaces that were available to modify.” Corralling engineers, safety, manufacturing and finance teams “together to figure out what can we do and how quickly, who can we partner with to help us with the technical knowhow… from every spectrum of the GM team to make this happen.”

The questions they had to ask included some you might expect and some you might not. McGruder said they asked, “What must be true in order for us to do this? And, number two, how can we use the skillsets we have as a manufacturing company that knows how to design efficient processes, that knows how to quickly make continuous improvement? How can we use those skillsets here?” That included who to partner with to get missing skillsets and materials quickly. Lives were at stake every moment. “It was amazing how people put down what they were working on…So they could go help,” she said.

How “moving at ventilator speed” changed General Motors – and helped the Hummer EV come to be

The process of what McGruder calls “moving at ventilator speed” has changed GM’s culture and processes, along with their commitment to pivot to only manufacturing electric vehicles. It also made “adaptability” a priority in recruiting talent.

At a meeting with the Automotive Press Association of Detroit last December 2021, GM CEO Mary Barra said “Doing the ventilator project was kind of a game changer from a General Motors perspective, from a culture-change perspective," and it has sped up how they bring electric and other vehicles to market, according to the Detroit Free Press.

McGruder echoed and expanded on that sentiment, saying, “It was certainly a kernel for many things we've done since then.” Now they ask, for example, “What might we do for ourselves to remove barriers to innovation, similar to what we did with ventilators?”

She gave an example of their needing to put an elevator in an odd place in their building, and to do it over the weekend, “so that we could construct the production line in a place that was best suited for it.” After learning how to turn on a dime during the pandemic, she said, “we were able to do that. We were able to make a decision. We were able to pull in the right resources, both materials and people that we needed in order to do something that we would've never done under normal circumstances, and do it well and safely.”

As a result of “moving at ventilator speed,” GM – their people and systems – learned how they can remove obstacles and manage the inevitable conflicts that come up when innovating, especially when you need speed. This has helped them in their pivot to electric vehicles too.

“You've seen that with the Hummer EV that was just released,” McGruder said. “The Hummer EV was an example of one of the things we've done since the ventilator project that was an exhibition of the talent that we have in our typical space.”

Leveraging conflict to fuel new solutions faster

Empowered people who feel safe share their ideas more easily and often, making it easier to find the best way forward and faster. “Whether you are working in a manufacturing site or you're working in engineering, or you're working in finance, whether you're hourly, whether you're salaried, you are here for a reason and your voice matters.”

McGruder attributed building this culture in part to Mary Barra’s leadership, saying, “she has created for us, a way to talk to each other. That's different than what we had before.” McGruder clarified that, “it doesn't mean we're skipping through the daisies and always getting along and never disagreeing with each other and have perfect compromises.”

It means, she added, that “those disagreements are the fuel for the future. Where someone speaks up and they say, ‘I'm not sure if that's right.’ And the other person says, ‘help me understand why you're saying that.’ And that's how conflict can fuel innovation and conflict can fuel solutions that really aren't on the table of imagination before the conflict occurs.”

Innovations like the Hummer EV.

Listen to the full interview with Telva McGruder on Electric Ladies Podcast here.