From motorsport to building life-saving equipment fast in the Ventilator Challenge: Craig Wilson, of Williams Advanced Engineering, on the Meaning Business podcast
Meaning Business is a new podcast series, where Simon Lambert speaks to people from the world of business, who are doing interesting, innovative and meaningful things.
Meaning Business will uncover the stories behind business ideas, the inspiration driving entrepreneurs and how those interviewed cut their path to where they are today.
On this first episode, Meaning Business gets topical and speaks to Craig Wilson, Managing Director of Williams Advanced Engineering and part of the Ventilator Challenge UK project created to help fight coronavirus.
Williams Advanced Engineering draws on the motorsport heritage, knowledge, technology and way of working of the Williams Formula One team, and works with a variety of companies on high-tech projects, ranging from improving fridges to electric cars.
In the past two months, it has been involved in Ventilator Challenge UK – working with other high-tech British engineers to get more ventilators built quickly to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.
Just before Britain went into lockdown in March, as part of its role in the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium, Williams Advanced Engineering was tasked with re-engineering work for ParaPAC300 ventilators.
This involved producing a number of prototype components within a fortnight, so that production of the ventilators could be dramatically stepped up by the high tech British engineering firms that had stepped in to help battle coronavirus.
Williams Advanced Engineering’s work in the Ventilator Challenge UK involved working with other members of the high-tech consortium to dramatically step up production of the ParaPAC300 ventilators for the NHS
The project involved rapidly producing an initial batch of 5,000 ParaPAC300 ventilators for the NHS, which are usually made by Smiths Group but not subject to such high demand and so the capacity to suddenly increase supply did not exist.
The consortium was led by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, a group of UK manufacturing research centres and also included Airbus, GKN, Rolls-Royce, PA Consulting, Thales, Siemens, McLaren and BAE Systems.
What was it like to work on? How was it decided which role each company would take? What does Williams Advanced Engineering do in normal times?
Craig answers all this and more and tells us about his career and how he ended up at Williams AE on this podcast.