Independent Supply Chain Coach and Consultant
Describe a key mentor or key event in your life.
Susan Tyk: I started out in nursing. I believed that my destiny was to be a nurse and patient caregiver, so that’s where I started and what I went to school for.
I was doing my clinicals at a hospital in Milwaukee when I met Don, a supply chain manager. He had been in supply chain at that point for about 14 to 16 years. We became fast friends, partially because I used to call and nag him when I didn’t have what I needed for my patients. We spent a lot of time together, and he taught me so much about supply chain.
At one point I decided that nursing wasn’t for me, even though my passion was for caregiving. Don took me under his wing, and taught me supply chain inventory control. I started as an inventory control clerk. I moved to a manager in about six months for inventory control manager, and then I was the distribution manager. The hospital just kept adding responsibilities to me. I decided to pursue more of a business career.
So it worked out for the best because my passion is supply chain. He must have known it when he started to mentor me through it. But it was not where I had planned to be. I’d planned to be a clinician all my life so. So I’d say Don was probably the most instrumental as my mentor, because he taught me everything in supply chain and he also taught me so much in life. He was just a down-to-earth man that had made his way through tough circumstances. I really respected that in him and what he did with people’s lives and helping other others. I realized you don’t have to be a clinician to help people.
What have supply chain teams learned working amid the pandemic?
Tyk: My work this year with coaching has been really extreme, because none of us knew what we were going to do. It was all new to us.
I’ve learned that we can be flexible, and we have to think differently. And that was a lot of my coaching. I’ll give you some examples. Working with a team of sourcing professionals from Trinity Health, we had to procure hand sanitizer and various other products from non-traditional suppliers. One example was the procurement of hand sanitizers from distilleries that were able to shut down brewing and create the sanitizer and antibacterial wipes that were needed. We also worked with the container industry trying to figure out how we bottled this stuff, because that’s not what distilleries typically produce. So it was a learning experience for everyone. We didn’t have the common knowledge and the common information that we usually worked with, so we all had to step back and say, ‘How do we do this different?’
A second example is the way that a company like Ford Motor Company was able to produce ventilators and respond to a need for healthcare. Their efforts and quick response taught us that we need to look for production in uncommon places as well as we need to better understand where products are produced. We currently rely heavily on distributors for healthcare products and we are not as well educated as we should be on where all our products source from in the world. We will need to work on gaining a better understanding of options and opportunities moving forward.
We need to revisit the value and the expectations we should have of our GPOs and distributors. There are many opportunities across the board to think differently going forward. Understanding how to “source” products and not just place orders is very important. It will
be more important than ever to learn how to “spec” product and source in a different world.
We learned that allocations are a challenge. I don’t know what that means yet. We have to work through that to change the industry.
I’m reading and watching and learning how we’re going to think differently for the future. What should we be teaching our supply chain leaders for the future? We need to revisit the value of the GPO, distributor and sourcing opportunities. Since there was no “normal” procurement channels, it was imperative that supply chain leaders had to think outside the box to get what they needed for their customers.
We need to reset the bar, and if we’re going to support GPOs, what do we do differently with them, and get them thinking outside the box of what they need to do different? I think many GPOs responded the way they needed to, but it was such a tedious chore because we were anxious in the supply chain. We were anxious to get the product, and we were mulling over how to do it continually, because there was no plan.
Many of the hospitals I work with had storage for disaster or pandemic. But we found we didn’t do a good job managing that. Most of it was expired. As we go forward, we need to rethink what we’re doing with these supplies and how we function with the supply chain overall.
We also learned that we don’t have a clear view of our supply channels from production to bedside and that will be something we need to better understand. Too much manual calculations and labor to track the supplies.
Describe key characteristics of the successful supply chain leader of the future.
Tyk: Supply chain leaders will have to be able to think on their feet more than ever. Flexibility and perseverance come to mind. Future leaders will need skills in sourcing and product spec development. We need to embrace technology both at the level of distribution of product all the way to the bedside. There are so many things to change and learn from our complacent past. We have learned that we will not be able to do what we have always done the same way in the future supply chain. It is a great time for us to make the changes that we have thought about making for years in our industry.