It was 11:30 p.m. on Friday, March 20 and Dean Birkmeier, Director of Advanced Operations at Stryker’s Medical division, was still working. “I knew that something had to be done. Hospitals urgently needed beds, and our existing products were designed to be customized, requiring time that hospitals just didn’t have,” said Dean. “I wanted to figure out how to design a new bed using readily available materials and processes that would allow the team to move at a speed never before attempted.”

So, he made a call and laid out the beginnings of his plan to a few members of our Medical division’s leadership team. Together, they marshaled a team of over 120 individuals from our Medical, Instruments and Joint Replacement divisions - to build a bed.

With ingenuity and collaboration, this team quickly designed the prototype, built a new supply chain, and integrated it vertically for regional manufacturing to meet the global demand.

In the U.S., the team began sourcing the largest commodity that was needed, steel, and soon realized that what they thought would be the most straightforward commodity to come by was one of the biggest challenges.

The project required enough steel to stretch from New York to Dallas while the entire U.S. economy was slowing down. Calling every steel mill and service center in the U.S. and Canada, the team eventually secured the material. And just two days after the bed design was finalized, the shipments began arriving.