Achieving production goals in record time

Based in the town of Westbrook, Maine, Lanco Integrated is known for providing turn-key assembly solutions to global customers, primarily in the medical and automotive fields. At the outbreak of COVID-19, QIAGEN contacted Lanco Integrated with a request to support their production facility in Germantown, Maryland, for mini spin columns systems – a key component in testing kits for the coronavirus. To meet the request, the machine needed to be ready in eight weeks rather than the thirty-five weeks it usually takes to build.

David Raymond and Jake Rollins, two engineers from Lanco Integrated, were designated as the project leads for creating this epic machine. Neither imagined that they could pull it off. “When the request came in for the spin column machine to be ready in eight weeks, I immediately thought this is crazy. We can't build a machine in eight weeks. But then my next thought was, ‘There has to be a way to do it’,” says Rollins. Once they got over the shock of such a daunting timeline, the two engineers stepped up to the plate and set out to make it work. 

Record time

To start, the team leaned on existing technology based on a machine concept that Lanco had built for QIAGEN twenty years ago, then transformed it to work in today’s machine-building culture. “It is standard practice and less risky to work off of technology that has been proven, but even so, the new machine is capable of producing 6,000 spin columns per hour, and that involves quite a few parts,” says Raymond.

Most of the Lanco workforce is working remotely to ensure operations continue, and chances of contamination remain minimal. This is a new approach for Lanco that, according to Rollins, actually helped the teams get more done in the end. “We were very new to this remote process,” explains Raymond, ”so we were developing our processes on the fly. For material procurement, for example, we were preordering stuff before we were typically ready to. Knowing that we had to kind of put our money on the table up front and put a bet on what we were going to use for us to be able to receive it on time.” The bet paid off, however, and the design phase for a machine that typically took engineers five to six weeks was completed in an astounding six days. 

Embracing change

For Raymond and Rollins, the changes in how they work signal a fundamental shift that has put Lanco on a new trajectory. “The outbreak has certainly changed the face of our company as it has allowed us to see how much more efficient we can become,” says Raymond, one of three engineers still onsite. Working 17-hour days was not unheard of for the teams. “There was a collaboration between QIAGEN offices in Germany and Maryland, and daily meetings working around the time differences. In the beginning, we were working seven days a week until midnight or 2 o'clock in the morning to get everything pushed through,” says Rollins. 

Jake explains that the Lanco team was made up of 20-25 people over two shifts working on designing and building this 60-foot machine around the clock. By making the necessary adjustments to accommodate higher production loads, the company has proven this rate of work is possible. “We're finding out really quickly that we can get a lot more done with the tools that we already have available,” says Jake. “We were thrown into the fire on how quickly we can adapt, both in design-build and in every phase of our company. And our team hit a home run,” he says.

A worthy endeavor

The sheer enormity of the machine’s capabilities is demonstrated in its production quantities of spin columns: “The spincolumn machine will be producing approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand parts per day. That’s almost a million parts per week,” says Raymond. “We need to produce and conduct as many tests as possible, and the quicker we can get the system out, the quicker we can start testing the global population. There are opportunities for expediting our build process that we never thought possible. The effort that we're putting into the QIAGEN machine has really opened our eyes as a company as to what we can accomplish with a common goal.”