Embracing the supply web of ingenuity requires unchaining from the past.
By R. Dana Barlow
September 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Some may characterize the COVID-19 pandemic experience as uncovering cracks in the fortress of and frayed seams in the fabric of the global-national-regional-local supply chain(s). These represent pessimists masquerading as realists or simply cloaked in the cape of realism.
Others may use the pandemic experience to stretch the creative possibilities, open unique opportunities and establish fresh new strategies and tactics for the “supply web” in the post-pandemic world – not to pass blame, point fingers and wave the white flag. These represent optimists prime! Big difference.
For the former, the glass might only be half-full or half-empty; for the latter, the glass always remains full because they see air occupying the top half and a liquid the bottom half. Attitude and perspective.
In short, the crisis either brought the blame-and-shame game and a retreat to a different career, job or profession, or it unlatched the shackles and chains that handcuffed the minds of those who equipped and fortified clinicians to keep people healthy and the economy chugging.
Just like standing in a long queue in the grocery store with nearly empty carts interspersed among the teeming loads until a cashier opens an adjacent line for you to slide over for faster service, the optimists both self-aware and alert among their surroundings were able to pivot quickly – emotionally, mentally, physically and operationally, to satisfy their customers clinically and their employers financially.
Those three years between 2020 and 2023 required the retirement of conventional thinking and the way it’s always been – prematurely perhaps for some, but permanently for others. The global crisis ignited cleverness, composure and creativity when it was sorely and holistically needed.
Some supply chain leaders and professionals, energized by easing federal rules, engineered ways to reprocess selected products that had been classified as single-use-only for limited repurposing.
Others turned to beverage companies that dedicated manufacturing efforts and hours to produce hand sanitizer to offset supply shortages, stockouts and backorders.
Automotive manufacturers and textile companies dedicated manufacturing lines to producing protective face shields and face masks.
A handful of integrated delivery networks (IDNs) invested in 3-D printing equipment either directly or indirectly as a purchased service from airplane and rocket manufacturers to produce selected items that could be molded and shaped as quickly as possible.
A select number of healthcare organizations dispatched supply chain professionals from their own teams to international hubs and ports under the guise of enabling closer access to sourcing raw materials for manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical/surgical products as well as linking labor to production.
Others embraced their competitors – whether nearby, across town or even over the state line – to share available supplies and/or unoccupied space in consolidated service centers, makeshift storage units from cargo containers and warehouses, some of which were vacated retail locations under lease. Further, they shared strategies, tactics and tips to move forward.
The crisis also cemented closer ties between supply chain and information technology (IT) as the two teams collaborated on demand planning and forecasting procedures, processes and tools to streamline communications between myriad points in the supply web – from all points within the IDN or healthcare organization to manufacturers, distributors, third-party logistics companies inside and outside of healthcare.
Automation – via online communication, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain and the blossoming emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) offered possibilities and promise if you could harness the horsepower reliably and accurately.
They recognized that the solid-line demarcations between external and internal conditions and factors needed to blur or dot to streamline the assembly line of product design, manufacture, delivery, use and disposal (with a potential element of recycling for sustainability as webs tend to be circular) and keep production fluid in a malleable masterclass of end-to-end operations.
Most importantly, perhaps, is that they’ve been sharing their experiences in traditional and social media, print and online, at conferences and trade shows, in mentoring and training, so that everyone remembers the ingenuity needed to escape a tightening knot – not to self-congratulate but to perpetuate the open-mindedness necessary for when – not if – that next crisis emerges.
Through effective planning, bolstered by backup planning and fortified with backup planning to the backup planning, the supply chain – or web – today can approach, treat and ward off tomorrow’s uncertainty with certainty.
R. Dana Barlow serves as a senior writer and columnist for The Journal of Healthcare Contracting. Barlow has nearly four decades of journalistic experience and has covered healthcare supply chain issues for more than 30 years. He can be reached at rickdanabarlow@wingfootmedia.biz.