Honeywell’s Global Supply Chain Chief on how the company administered 16K vaccinations in one weekend

Torsten Pilz, Honeywell Global Supply Chain Chief, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss Honeywell teaming up with Atrium to create mass COVID-19 vaccination sites.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: I want to invite into the stream Torsten Pilz. He is Honeywell's global supply chain chief. And the reason I set this up that way is because not only did you folk get involved to show this can be done better-- you've already helped vaccinate 16,000 people. I believe you've got a target vaccination program coming up this weekend involving Bank of America and cutting through the clutter that so many people are complaining about. Tell us more about this, Torsten.

TORSTEN PILZ: Yeah, we did an event about a year ago at Charlotte Motor Speedway. And we vaccinated 16,000 people. And for this weekend, we plan to increase that number to about 20,000 people here at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte.

SEANA SMITH: Torsten, talking about how you were able to do this so quickly, I think that's a big question here because we've seen the government-- the government's clearly been a little bit overwhelmed-- but struggle to get Americans vaccinated at the pace that they were initially expecting to do so. So what did you do that made you guys so successful and the fact that you could actually ramp up in such a short amount of time?

TORSTEN PILZ: Yeah, so we had great partners, Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Carolina Panthers. But what we did actually, was we used very impactful technology that we usually see in retail or e-commerce or supply chain and logistics. And we used that technology and tried to apply this to this vaccination as a process.

So we really looked at it from a high-volume assembly line perspective and thought about it. What would it take in order to really industrialize that process?

And look, Honeywell operates very complex, large-scale operations. And we just applied the same thinking to vaccination as a process.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Is it as simple as, once I've registered, I get some kind of something downloaded to my phone. And then when I scan the phone, all is done and speed up the process?

TORSTEN PILZ: That's part of it, yes. That's part. We deployed one of our apps. And it does exactly this. But it's more than that.

There's a lot of other processes involved where you need the manual data, for instance. And we automated this using our own barcode scanners and our own technology that we have.

We also deployed a lot of, let's say, monitoring technology to see whether we have bottlenecks, whether we have potential long queues. And we were able to quickly then deploy additional resources to mitigate that. And that made it so smooth and efficient.

The average time from a check-in to when the patient got his vaccine was probably 10 minutes. So I think it was a very smooth and efficient process.

SEANA SMITH: Torsten, what role do you think Honeywell can play in helping other companies do similar things just in terms of some of the steps that you've taken, because I know your CEO has said it multiple times, that it's not just regional to North Carolina? He wants you to develop a playbook and really help other companies maybe do similar initiatives as what Honeywell is doing.

TORSTEN PILZ: Right. So it's absolutely transferable to other areas. So we're creating a playbook that says, here's how you do this. This is what you need to take into account. This is the kind of technology that you want to use. And this is basically the sequence and what you need to think about this.

It's basically an industrial view on a process. And we do believe that, except for the vaccination step itself and the monitoring of a patient afterwards, everything else can actually be accelerated and sped up using software and technology.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Torsten, I got a phone number for you. It's 212-639-9675. Call that number and ask for a guy named de Blasio, mayor of New York City, and offer this to them. And get this ship righted, please, because trying to get the process here in New York City, having gone on to the website, it's a nightmare. I got to say, thank you, Torsten Pilz, Honeywell's global supply chain chief. All the best to you. And we'll be right back.