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1 //HEROIC EFFORT PRODUCES MACHINE IN JUST EIGHT WEEKS
Lanco Integrated has completed an assembly system to produce components for coronavirus test kits. Typically designing and building such a machine would take 35 weeks. Lanco had it ready in just eight weeks.
"When the request came in...I immediately thought, This is crazy/" says Jake Rollins, a Lanco engineer. "We can't build a machine in eight weeks. But then my next thought was, There has to be a way to do it.'"
The project was commissioned by Dutch medical company QIAGEN at the onset of the pandemic. The machine would need to assemble 6,000 parts per hour.
Working remotely, the Lanco team developed processes on the fly. "For material procurement, for example, we were preordering stuff before we were typically ready to, knowing that we...