STRATEGIC SOURCING & LOGISTICS
Next-generation distribution models must embrace that syncing feeling
by Rick Dana Barlow Photo credit: sittinan |
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lmost two years into the COVID- 19 pandemic (and its variant offspring) and people seem even more fed-up and irritated with the supply chain around the most fundamental of issues – primarily not having stuff acces- sible when they want it and secondarily, paying way more for what is available. If the supply chain were a pickup truck the public would want to see a gleaming, fresh-off-the-lot, bells-and-whistles- laden luxury model. Instead, they rely on a beat-up old rust bucket, well-worn with six-digit mileage after toiling for years on the farm or work site. Further, these days, more people envision that patinaed work truck on cement blocks minus the tires.
During his keynote address at the Association of Healthcare Resource and Materials Management (AHRMM) conference last August in Nashville, award-winning professor and consultant Randy Bradley, Ph.D., tried to set the record straight with a more realistic and reasonable portrait of the supply chain in peril. He countered those who continued to lament that it was broken. “We found out it wasn’t broken, but fragile,” Bradley, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management and Information Systems, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Haslam College of Business, Department of Supply Chain Management, told several hundred attendees in a scaled- down convention center hall at one of
the few in-person industry events slowly re-emerging from a sea of online virtual conferences. “It did what it was supposed to do. It did what it did but nothing more. It’s performing as designed and not designed to perform. It wasn’t ready for the mess we were thrust into. “The global supply network is like a basket of eggs,” he observed. “We need to handle it with care. Irrational buying creates waves. We were never out of toi- let paper. We just bought more than we needed for two years. The supply chain was not broken. We are.”
Catching the wave As the supply chain has weathered a host of challenges and disruptions that span access to raw materials; labor shortages at docks, ports and warehouses; fuel cost increases for airplanes, cargo ships and trucks; government intervention; questionable demand planning and data reliability; and the human reactionary behavior of panic buying, supply chain executives and professionals have faced a brunt of criticism, whipsawing between the widening gap that separates realis- tic accomplishments from reasonable expectations.
Might a single linchpin be driving this? What might it be? Or is each merely chipping away and poking holes in an otherwise solid structure?
The global supply chain (of which healthcare represents a component) has been something of a powder keg and
12 January 2022 • HEALTHCARE PURCHASING NEWS •
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perceived by the public as the poster child for ineffi ciency. Deserved Earned Debatable, sources told Healthcare Purchasing News.
“The human behavior of panic buying, which we have seen in retail during the pandemic, is not new to healthcare,” observed Cory Turner, CMRP, Senior Director, Healthcare Strategy, Tecsys Inc. “It is some- thing supply chain lead- ers have struggled with for a long time.” Turner knows quite a
Cory Turner
bit about that struggle as a former supply chain executive within Greenville (SC) Healthcare System, HPN’s 2013 Supply Chain Department of the Year. “Clinicians who have come up against supply shortages in the past tend to be distrustful of supply chain’s ability to get what they need when they need it,” he continued. “They also don’t trust the old, disjointed inventory management systems used in procedural areas for supply replenishment. “All of this drives a hoarding mentality among clinicians with the idea that ‘I’ve run out of products before [and] I’m not going to let it happen again.’ Throw a pandemic on top of these long-held beliefs and behaviors, where clinicians are experiencing real supply shortages and problems that impact patient care, and the panic buying has only become worse,” he added.
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