How Did JHB Change Production to Quickly Fight Coronavirus?

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So how did JHB Group, a fire safety equipment manufacturer, start creating mobile trailers for COVID testing and vaccination at short notice?

Well, switching products can be faster that you might imagine, but it’s certainly not the easiest thing to do!

In March 2020, the JHB team needed to figure out a solution for the future of JHB Group.

With short-notice government lockdowns causing every fire department, government agency and county office to shut its doors, the primary market for our custom built fire safety simulators had instantly vanished!

We were suddenly about to have a business with NO customers or income! And if we didn’t do something, and do it quickly, we’d also have no business going forward!

So how did we keep JHB Group running and save our team’s jobs?

We made a quick decision, to pivot! 

We shifted from manufacturing fire safety simulators to manufacturing health incident trailers for Covid-19 testing and vaccination. 

We worked 18+ hour days for weeks on end to design and manufacture an effective mobile trailer that would safely and effectively test for COVID-19. 

The good news is, that by repurposing our production line it maintained, and even increased ten-fold (!) our output since Covid-19 started!

It’s just over a year ago we knew nothing about creating sanitized health trailers for a pandemic emergency, and now we’re making 40+ trailers with new orders coming in every week, relocating to an airplane hanger because we ran out of space! It’s pretty incredible!

And the best part is it helps a much bigger battle - of beating this pandemic!!

But then, once the threat of sudden financial ruin eased, the actual process of manufacturing the health incident trailer proved to be a challenge in itself! 

Sourcing suddenly scarce materials is one issue. Although we quickly built-up our production team (still in need of more workers), they’re often at a standstill, waiting for parts and materials to arrive. Getting ahold of plywood, cables, appliances, lighting, electronics, etc are a daily hurtle. 

Now we’re spending a large amount of time, just working with the supply chain to make sure that we’re using as many readily available components so that we can make health trailers as fast as humanly possible.

But many times production still gets stalled due to delayed deliveries, and COVID break-outs causing factories to close or become short-handed for staff.

Then, even after sorting out all the design and production for the health incident trailers, getting the trailers modified for COVID vaccination administering. Initially, our health trailers were designed for COVID testing, and general emergency purposes and now that we have vaccines, we’ve had to modify the design of the health trailer, as well as ALL of the health trailers currently in production!
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Now that our health trailers have been re-designed over and over more than a dozen times, we’re excited to have developed such a rapid Covid-19 innovation that is also operate as a multi-functional emergency management vehicle. Our health incident trailer can be used for a myriad of emergency situations such as; tornado and severe weather response, surveillance, vaccinations and a multitude of things in-between!

Find out more about our health and emergency trailers at: https://bit.ly/3mow7cd
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Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on our latest health incident trailer design!