LCR Hallcrest pivoted to 1M forehead thermometers a week in the COVID crunch

When COVID-19 hit, LCR Hallcrest — a specialty printer whose thermometers tell you a dishwasher reached sanitizing temperature — pivoted to making disposable forehead thermometers for local hospitals, ramping to one million a week. It was the company's second such flip: during the 2003 SARS outbreak it made the same move, when a recent acquisition left it with double the machines and double the staff.

The playbook was stored capacity. Vice president of operations Rocky Sapienza told Supply Chain Dive the company still held much of that duplicate equipment; after servicing and sanitizing it, the firm hired 15 additional part-time workers and ran at full speed, drawing on a large safety stock for the first weeks of production and on suppliers almost all based in the US, so it did not anticipate disruption in new materials.

The pivot had a price: the company put its customized promotional products line on hold, explaining to customers that personalization 'in times like these they're not' and offering them unprinted items to finish themselves. Cross-training did the rest — new hires took jobs like packing while existing employees moved up to printing, already trained for the shift.

A million disposable forehead thermometers a week for local hospitals, staffed by 15 new part-time hires on serviced SARS-era machines.

Equipment bought for the SARS ramp sat ready, so scaling meant servicing machines rather than ordering and installing them.

Cross-training let new hires take packing while incumbents moved up to printing, adding capacity without new skills.

A mostly US supplier base and heavy safety stock removed the import dependencies that stalled other pivots.

The company paused its own promotional-products line to free line capacity for hospital demand.

Redundancy is a pivot option: duplicate machines kept from the last crisis, cross-trained staff, domestic suppliers and safety stock turned a pandemic order into a production plan.

Production held at one million disposable forehead thermometers a week for local hospitals, with the company expecting no disruption in incoming materials.