Shawmut was able to identify five Chinese suppliers who offered automated equipment with delivery lead times as short as 30 to 45 days, but adapting the equipment to its line in Massachusetts was challenging due to a dearth of automation engineering expertise in the United States. With most of the world’s mask production capacity in China, equipment suppliers had shifted there as well. Shawmut was able to acquire a melt-blown fabric line from Reifenhäuser of Germany on an “accelerated” seven-month delivery schedule, but there were no suppliers of N95-cup-mask assembly equipment in the United States or Europe. The void in domestic tool-making capacity was even more challenging.
SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES 2021 TRIAL
All of these were available from numerous suppliers in China, but developing a domestic source took months of trial and error. sources for mask components such as moldable cup materials, elastic straps, and specially coated aluminum strips for the nose bridge. Though there were a few domestic sources of melt-blown fabric, no manufacturer could offer Shawmut any capacity when it needed it. domestic manufacturers of masks rely heavily on Chinese sources - including their captive facilities in China - for some of their melt-blown fiber. As the garment industry moved to Asia in the early 2000s, melt-blown fabric producers moved as well to be close to those customers. Not surprisingly, China is the major producer of melt-blown fabrics thanks to the scale and scope of its garment industry. This is followed by an assembly process that adds head straps, an aluminum nose clamp, nose foam, and the required markings that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has approved the product.Īs it tried to rise to the occasion, Shawmut had to confront two challenges: finding sources of melt-blown filter material and ancillary components and acquiring automated production equipment for the fabrication and assembly of the mask itself. The filter material is then ultrasonically welded to a thermo-formed cup to create the face-fitting part of the mask. The melt-blown fibers are randomly deposited in a sheet and electrostatically charged to form a highly efficient, fabric-like filter material.
N95s are filtering respirators that use a polypropylene non-woven fabric made by a melt-blowing process. The impact of weakening the commons can be seen in Shawmut’s efforts to respond to an urgent appeal from Massachusetts business leaders and state government officials for N95 masks early in the pandemic. This offshoring was accompanied by the movement of suppliers who chose to follow their customers abroad, leading to a widespread loss of U.S. But American manufacturers offshored a significant amount of production in fields such as electronics as early as the 1970s, and this approach expanded dramatically into information technology (IT) and communications equipment in the 1990s and broad swaths of industry in the early 2000s. When a country has a robust industrial commons, a firm can draw on domestic suppliers of materials, makers of production equipment and tooling, and a workforce that has the necessary skills to operate those processes. Manufacturing any product requires a supply of raw materials as well as the skills and the production tools to convert those inputs into outputs. Rebuilding a Weak Commons Must Begin with Imports Shawmut’s experience offers insight into how the difficulty of rebuilding domestic capabilities may depend on a complex set of factors, including the health of adjacent manufacturing sectors and changes in buying and regulatory practices. To illustrate both sets of challenges, we describe the efforts of Massachusetts-based Shawmut, a producer of advanced textiles, to help satisfy the soaring need for N95 masks and hospital gowns during the pandemic. interests.Īddressing this decline requires an appreciation of factors related to both the supply side (the industrial capabilities for making these products) and the demand side (how these products are bought and sold). “ industrial commons” - the domestic capabilities needed to support the development and production of many goods deemed critical to U.S. government officials have been carrying out President Biden’s executive order to propose remedies to the risks that such networks pose to four specific areas (pharmaceuticals, strategic materials such as rare earth minerals, semiconductors, and large-capacity batteries) and six sectors of the economy (defense, public health, communications technology, energy, transportation, and food production). We think they will find one fundamental cause is the erosion of the U.S. Shortages of essential medical supplies, semiconductors, and other goods and materials during the Covid-19 pandemic have dramatically exposed the vulnerabilities of global supply chains.
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