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How To Save Millions And Still Break The Spreadsheet Habit · Taking The Supply Chain Pulse

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Taking the Supply Chain Pulse.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Megan with Sainonge Company, and we have a special guest joining Fred for today's conversation.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's my pleasure to introduce longtime listener and executive director of supply chain and technology at Stanford Medicine, Omar Devlin.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Omar shares his experiences and his perspectives on what compels someone to work in the challenging and exciting space of healthcare.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now here is your host, Fred Kranz.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Today we have an interesting guest.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: I met Omar Devlin at a major meeting a few weeks ago, and he came up to me and told me something that I found it very difficult to believe, and I'm going to have him tell you here in a second.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: He's from Australia.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: He is currently the executive director of supply chain technology and analytics at Stanford Medicine.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: He has an amazing background.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: You'll hear him with his Aussie accent here in a second.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to have a great conversation because Omar has worked in some interesting places and he has some interesting perspectives.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we can all learn from him.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, Omar, welcome to our podcast.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And your podcast series was the main one that I listened to.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I listened to every single episode through in the month prior to starting at Stanford Healthcare.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I got a really, really good insight into healthcare and all your interviews.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was absolutely a pleasure to be here, and it was a pleasure to meet you.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you're telling me that you listened to me for a month and then you still decided to go into medicine?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: It sounded like a challenging and exciting space from what I learned.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't believe it.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: When you tell me that I'm going, I can't believe that somebody's life was so pitiful that they listened to me for a month.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I appreciate it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: I really do.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So why don't you tell us uh a little bit about you know your background, Omar, where you where you were born, where you come from, how you got to the United States, and uh the degrees you got and and the interesting names of uh the places in Australia, including your university.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us a little bit about that.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'd love to, Fred.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I I've been in America for about 15 years.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um my wife's American, and so that's what brought me over to this to this wonderful country um into California.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um we actually met in Australia back in 2000 uh when she was on exchange for at the University of Wollongong, which is the university I went to.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And she was an exchange student, we fell in love, all that stuff, had a four-month relationship, was then had an international relationship for two years, um, until we got married and then lived together in Australia for 10 years, and um then we've been over here for about 15 years since that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I started my career through I was I was born in a born in a little surf town called Byron Bay, Australia, which is a a very famous surf town on the east coast.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I lived there in my family in my family restaurant for 18 years and I love the restaurant industry and all that, and I'll come back to that through later.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I went down to the the University of of Wollongong on a cadet ship program with Blue Scope Steel.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was with them for 12 years, which is uh an amazing program where you work full-time and you go to university part-time, and so you really get the practical, on-the-ground, hands-on experience training, uh moving every year between different departments in in the steel industry.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I did my mechanical engineering degree there from across Coke Making, steel making, hot strip meal, all of that place.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I I love that experience.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um post that still with Blue Scope Steel, I ended up doing my MBA, part-time as well, as well as my master's of science in in logistics.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I finished off with Blue Scope Steel in the last sort of five years there, really running as a principal consultant, the supply chain and logistics development team.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was really as a point person with a team going across Australia, having a look for where are problems in the supply chain, where do we have bottlenecks, where do we have quality issues, delivery issues, etc., going through assessing, solving, and then implementing solutions in that space.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that really drove, I think, my love for change, um, change management, and how to come in and assess, um, find the problem.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of it always links back to business process, and that's sort of core in my foundation through.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and implementing the technology side as well was another huge core component.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, implementing SNIP, transportation management systems, etc.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so so let's just sort of level set here.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: You you have an interesting start if as I'm hearing this, is number one, you're formally educated in in all the aspects of uh of mechanical industrial engineering and uh and uh and so and logistics and formal supply chain training while at the same time working full time sort of from the bottom up in an organization.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: So you learned not only theoretical skills, but you at the same time, concurrently, you learned how things got done and how they needed to get done, which is a a real rarity.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think you know that that happens very infrequently.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that must have really given you uh sort of a leg up for the rest of your career, I would imagine.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The the Blue Scope Steel cadet chip program is one of the best in Australia through.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I I distinctly remember there there were many, many moments, but there was this there was this one at 2 a.m.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: in the morning on the hot strip mill with a shutdown, as we're there with an oxy cutter or an accelerant cutter through, cutting off some bolts from a roller coming out through.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time when we're all frustrated and getting there, the fitters at the time and see how the engineers designed this, it was ridiculous.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't considered on the maintenance, it wasn't considered how we're actually going to access it through.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is what they should have done differently.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, having to your point that hands-on application, I think fundamentally made for a lot better designer and a lot better at solutions because you're not just coming from the theoretical, you're always coming in from what is the user experience.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that has been embedded in my culture of how I treat supply chain from across my career.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, what did you learn more from?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: The uh theoretical knowledge in the classroom or the guys on the floor?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very much a guys on the floor.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I very much take from the lens of practicality.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I like to touch and feel.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: If I bring it back to the hospital environment here right now, I spend a lot of time with our clinical operations.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time on our receiving dock.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And my big push with my team as well is, for example, Gembers.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, we've got to get out of the office.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to spend, and I have a requirement, you're gonna spend one day a month actually on the coalface with the team doing the problem.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is not just doing analytics, coming up with a business process.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: How do we sit there and go forward to understand where the true pain points are?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it translates itself into small things.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: For example, a report or an analysis or a dashboard that one of the teams might be creating through, when you have a look at it, does the call to action stand out?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: How many clicks does it take to get to oh, it's only 22 clicks, they do this, this, this, and this?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, but someone who's seeing this for the first time, how intuitive is it?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's really, really about understanding how do we get insights and knowledge to an actionable state?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's that call to action, that bias for action, that's very much an Amazon philosophy through, how do we get better at that?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I bring that into the onto the Stanford culture through across healthcare because there was a lot of meetings and a lot of discussions, and there's a lot of engagement through, which can take a really long time.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do within that process we always boil it down to pilots, testing, MVP, and I'll talk a little bit about that with my tech background through, as the key thing we need to start?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you prove it?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get into play?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'll say one thing as an 81-year-old guy, um, what uh as not yet, I'll be 81-year-old soon.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what may be intuitive to you young folks that know technology ain't intuitive to us.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that's where the mix of the generations on the work floor and all the other thing, you know, brings into perspective that the folks that are in the, you know, Stanford's a Stanford is a highly renowned uh academic uh institution where all the people there can read and uh and think.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, a lot of guys in the on the that have to apply these solutions don't have that level of education.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: They're not theoretical, they're real.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so bringing the two together is really something.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: But tell us when you came to America, I know you worked for XBO and then Apple.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: What was your uh what was your what did you do at Apple and what was your experience there?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so when I when I moved over, and and I'll kick start with XBO.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so XPO was a uh 3PL logistics provider.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: We actually had the contract with Google.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I was on site at Google running the supply chain uh from a customer service, transportation, and trade compliance perspective.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a team across in Dublin, Atlanta, Mountain View, Singapore, and it was really how do we move all of that all of Google's products for all of its data centers around the world, it was to 162 countries.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how do we ensure that is seamless?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have transparency in that space.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the big elements I I learned from that um is actually the complexities of global trade compliance.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I remember daily dealing with issues going through it into Argentina, couldn't believe the trade compliance issues there of months taking it through the codes required for two different types of fans or wires.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so as you start to look through at that, it always comes back to me.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm strongly data-driven.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so, where do we see where the true issues are?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: How do we print those out, and how do we knock those out in a systemic way?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so really, really love my time at Google through there.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: I went across then to through to Apple.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And at Apple, I was leading the business process re-engineering team.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was actually implementing at the time a transportation management system called OTM.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we had 700 million in freight spend from across Apple.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is uh another great, great time where when you implement technology and you utilize it to its potential of what it can actually get out.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the time before we before we implemented it, we had I'd call base contracts in place that had UPS has this corridor, FedEx has this corridor, we negotiated with them and they say these are the best rates.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: We turned on OTM.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I was at the warehouse in Reno, um, and as the packages were coming off the truck, they off the line, they would typically all go into the FedEx truck.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, they all started to go into the UPS truck because that was the using the rate optimization logic, that was what was cheaper for those packages.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Within a week, we had a new contracted rates through with FedEx.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um we ended up saving like$60 million that year through because finally we're able to optimize not just you carrier, have this entire market, but per specific package, what is the most optimal place to send that through?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is where throughout my career, how do we use technology to be smart smarter?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we ensure that the business processes associated with technology allow that choice?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'll go back to another example when we implemented it the same way at TMS, a Blue Scope steel in Victoria.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I remember this.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: We had um Peter Susovich, he was a transportation planner, awesome guy.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time it was like, right, I would like TMS to look exactly like my spreadsheet that I have right now.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Here are the 20 columns.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make this new fancy tool give me this exact output through?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is a fault element of a lot of configuration that we do in technology, is that we replicate the current processes, we try and ensure that we make it easier for the users taking all their requirements and delivering exactly on that.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a firm believer in pausing, saying, what are the what are the opportunities of how to optimize and use technology to its full potential?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then what do we actually need to change or standardize with our business process that we can achieve and operationalize those best practice through?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you do that, and it's harder and it's longer, and you're gonna work with people and you're gonna do the change management part, you fundamentally get a better outcome and you can actually move the processes forward.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: So huge believer through in that space.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: So love Blue Scope still, where it really brought a foundation through of process, then through at the on the Google side, start to understand global complexities of supply chain movements and the challenges through in that space, and then across through to Apple, where from a volume perspective of spend and and their process, and really a standard of excellence, I would say, at Apple was really, really high.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But again, how do you use data for informed decision making from an optimized state?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was uh even even in that area, Apple a lot more open to change and implementing that through.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's interesting.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: And after Apple, let's see.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you yeah, XPO and then Apple, but um you were the VP of procurement and sourcing supply chain operations for Logic Source for a while.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about that.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Logic Source was a startup company who who was really changing the game for how do we do indirect spend and how do we take how do we help organizations take it from fragmented departmental ownership more to that standard across the organization for optimization?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I ran the the West Coast there across a number of different clients, and one of the recurring themes that came out of that, that I think exists within all supply chain and exists up to today, is every departmental manager or business leader loves to own the spend in their space and loves to be the decision maker in their space across that.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the and the difficult part, but where all the benefit sits is how do we start to get that from a total organizational view to say you've got 10 million on marketing, you've got five million, you've got two, you've got three, how do we bring all that together?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Understand this sort of 10 million spend in this category.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is our strategy?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: How do we understand all the requirements, bring it, bring it together, and then handhold through to is there an optimized solution in that space from a sourcing perspective, ultimately from a vendor perspective?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you could drive huge opportunities in savings.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was kind of amazing of the spend that we that I saw through in the millions of dollars and how to cut millions of spend out through good negotiations, good RFPs, and bring them to the table.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: I remember this one company that we worked with, it was um Leslie Pools at the time, and they had a really interesting strategy, which which I do kind of like, why?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um where they would change around the suppliers on a sort of a two-yearly basis.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: So why I think that is absolutely critical is it means that you are in control of the business process, that suppliers plug in in a sense to you are the owners of your space.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so whether it was switching between UPS and FedEx and UPS and FedEx, sometimes suppliers integrate in, and without that supplier owning that process, you as a business are kind of hamstrung.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, I'm not really sure how we do it.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: We always just do it with this supplier, and so cost process is really up to them.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: How do you own that yourself as the strategic advantage?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Before we dive back in, you may be asking yourself, is my supply chain future ready?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: As a teenage company, we don't just optimize logistics, we engineer smarter, leaner, and more resilient systems from end to end, from manufacturing to retail to healthcare.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our experts bring decades of experience in cutting into strategies that transform your operations.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Visit and discover how we're shaping the future of supply chain, one solution at a time.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: Is the sentence that you said is that the people in the various department love to own uh their process and love to make their own decisions.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's a whole episode to do, and how do you uh how do you negotiate and gain trust to collaborate with those folks instead of uh being at odds with them?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: So let's save that.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that's that's an important thing.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: So after Logic Source, you went to another small startup company called Facebook, where you were the manager of infrastructure and asset management.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about that one because I this is building, we're building toward what you've learned in the past and what you bring to Stanford.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's what I'm building toward here.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me about that that little company, Facebook.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: That that little company was going through a fantastic growth stage at the time through, and in there I was leading an asset management team across for all the data centers.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we had billions, billions of dollars worth of assets across all data centers across the world.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we're looking at what is our asset controls, how do we know where they sit?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: How do we, from a SOX compliance perspective, um, how do we audit?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so the amount of time through in this is like here are the here are the 50,000 server pieces and modules within a data center.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do we know they're working?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Do we know they're not?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: How do we put an audit program in place?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: How do we check that as far as end of life, it's gone through for destruction?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's correctly, we get those signals back.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the big learning part out of that, and it comes through to data where you've got millions of lines through, same at Blue Scope Steel, I remember at Coke Making with millions of alarms through.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: How do you look for pattern recognition?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: How do you start to call out and go through what is a mass amount of unstructured data and understand where you need to look and highlight those in an easy way for further investigation through?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we're able to put in a great amount of controls of that.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think highlight when there's like 10,000 issues that you see, we're at the top 100.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do we learn through from those and apply those processes to more effectively clean out thousands at a time as opposed to one by one?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where the true power of using technology, using information is to make more efficient decisions in that space.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, man, I tell you.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you got, and finally, before you got to Stanford, you were the manager of global capacity delivery programs at another small startup company called Google.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Could you tell us about that experience?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: I led this great program at Global at Google of how do we speed up our infrastructure deployment of racks and servers around the world.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of our challenges there through as a business problem statement was it took us about 13 weeks from a customer wanting more server capacity.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get that down to three weeks?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really that reverse engineering of that entire lead time process.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we forward deploy racks ready that we can turn on?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do we know where those capacities need to be?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it really touches into demand planning and forecasting through.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we remove some of that configuration parts instead of waiting for the 13 weeks that we can do final configuration in those last three weeks once we had that final confirmed order?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was Or one of the things I loved about these small large tech startups like Apple and Facebook and Google is the opportunities and the savings and the solutions we were deploying were in the tens of millions of dollars.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's like great, this is saving now$43 million.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is an awesome feeling from a scale perspective to be involved in change like that that we're deploying through.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the key parts I'll talk about across all of these through is you have what is kind of the problem statement that you're trying to solve through.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: You have technology that can support on that.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the two largest impacts and things I think throughout my career that I'm focused on there is one, the change management.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: How do you understand all the stakeholders, understand their requirements, bring them in together to aligned path forward, have them associate with a North Star vision, but clearly see the paths it takes to actually get there?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's one.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And two, it all fundamentally boils down to process.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as you bring people together on that, you you start to unpack and you need to surface.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you realize, team, we have five different processes here?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: So without having to configure our solution from a technology perspective to all five different processes, how do we build trust that we can move to this one this one process?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'll bring it back to a story I got from and something I learned from a mentor back in Blue Scope Steel, Dennis Stone, in in Coke Making, and it was about pilots.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Omar, I've got some pilots that have been going for 20 years.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: When you're implementing change through, how do you get some wins on the board?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do you just take away that fear of change by just saying, hey, here's a short-term one, we're just going to trial this, it's not a big impact, and we're going to learn from it.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a cycle to learn and not have that commitment.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is a whole lot easier than saying, here is a single big change.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: The change is right, and it's going to be implemented through.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think those are fundamentally built with resistance as opposed to piloting and testing and enabling the user to be part of the journey and know what they are getting and adapt and can change.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we want their feedback of what's working and what's not working well.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the last part of that story through, and kind of goes to the Google experience as well, is about MVP, the minimal viable product.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember when I first came through to Stanford and the team were implementing in a ISERTIS A contract management system, uh life cycle, and our technology team was working through 182 requirements.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you actually start to go through those requirements, like what's this requirement number 140?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, Jennifer would really like that.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Jennifer does this once a month, it takes a half an hour.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's all.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we spending hundreds of hours of configuration time on something that should just be a manual process and that's okay?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how do we get to it at Google?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: You'd collect 100 requirements and then you come back with this is great.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here are the 10 that we're gonna go live with as a pilot or an MVP.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: These others are phase two, three, and four, and that's okay.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are acknowledging this where it sits, but we're gonna test and go with this first because guess what?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: The moment you start, you will learn something different, and I guarantee you, what's what you thought was gonna be in phase three or four will drastically change based on now the knowledge of the users who are using it and say, Well, that problem's already actually I thought I I needed in the old application, has actually gone away.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Here is a new problem I'm seeing.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: How do we solve that?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's more important.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's that ability to liaise and communicate out to provide people safe and trusted environment that one, they're being heard, two, we're gonna try something that's not everything that you want, but we want to listen throughout the process and make sure we're constantly delivering um the changes that you need based on your experience.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we've been talking now for 25 minutes, Omar.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know what the process was at Stanford.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what they were what they were looking for, what the job description was um of the uh position you applied for.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I would have hired you by now, okay?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: In the first 20 25 minutes.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: So and then I figured out after I hired you, uh you tell me what things we need to uh we need to look at.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: So what was your what was Stanford looking for?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh what was your sort of charge when you came on, and how's it been going since you've been there?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll I will kick start that of why I went to Stanford.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd I'd I'd been in international businesses, large-scale supply chains.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it's a very personal story.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: So two years ago, um my 15-year-old daughter was diagnosed with osteo, sarcoma, bone cancer.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she is all safe and good right now, which is absolutely awesome.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we ended up in Stanford Hospital on the fifth floor.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: She started chemo treatment in October, two years ago.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that was brutal.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: We had surgery on her leg to take out the cancer, put in a cadaver bone through.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: We then had another five months through of chemo treatment.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that finished in July last year.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I spent a total of 130 nights in hospital with her as she was going through that treatment.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: During that time, I was amazed by the professionalism, the care, and the mission-driven side of what healthcare does.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is not about how do I produce a phone and make another billion dollars?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: How do I sit there and save bottom line another$30 million over there?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: But how do I sit there and enable a supply chain to meet true patient care that impacts people's lives?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that just warmed my heart.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, three months into the um being up in the hospital, I remember I was on the fifth floor of the afternoon.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was looking at jobs at Stanford and I saw this one of supply chain technology and analytics.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, that sounds really interesting.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I reached out to Amanda Charla at the time and said, Amanda, I would love to come and help.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so interviewed through and um I started through at Stanford in February, so about a year and a half ago through.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And my charge at the time was taking care of the supply chain technologies and also the analytics team in in that space.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I really, really respect and love about Amanda Chala as a leader in the supply chain space is she does an excellent job of empowering and enabling you to run your show and the scope that you see and need.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: So during the last year and a half, the amount of programs that we have stood up and led that were net new, that weren't there in the class, she gave the freedom and the support to enable us to do that.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: An example would be ChargeRite, which is a model of how do I look at what I'm buying, what I'm charting, and what I'm billing.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the the reason I'll use that as an example through is I think traditionally in healthcare and at Stanford, the supply chain organizations were, and I will say about 10 to 20 years behind outside of healthcare industry of what is the scope and mandate of supply chain.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the scope and mandate I'm used to from a supply chain perspective is end-to-end.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: End-to-end profitability for an item.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: I know all the way it delivers to the customer, how it's being used, what's my margin on it, all the way back to the raw material serving.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: My customer service side, all of that was in the scope.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: So to all of a sudden have it actually stops at we deliver the box, we deliver the item.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're not really sure what happens after that.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: If they need it, we will get it, and that's view.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was able to bring in this end-to-end view by partnering more than we ever have before with our Rev Cycle teams, with our clinical operations from our charting teams.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen massive improvements in that space by ensuring how do we have item master data accuracy that comes all the way back so it flows correctly through our systems that have reduced manual impact.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: We took over, took over the CLM program.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we make sure our contract lifecycle management program actually meets our users?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: We do with 400 contracts a month.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: What are they experiencing?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: How do we make that process faster?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Our P2P program, and we have improved drastically.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: If I look at P2P on our perfect order rate, we've gone from 84% to 96.5%.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: Our ranking has increased from 85 down to 22.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think bringing in this process-oriented approach that spans multiple teams and bringing them together to an aligned North Star, understanding what resources teams need and how to put transparency across that is where supply chain really, in my heart, puts value into an organization.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we sit.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: We sit as the orchestration layer across multiple teams to optimize the whole.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about each team passing the ball over on their scope.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's understanding, and I use the analogy with my team a lot when I first started through.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, don't just pass the ball.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: How do you go and run behind the player and support them to get a try?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's a rugby league analogy.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: But how do you take it down the line?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just passing from your responsibility to another.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: So what we have implemented at Stanford, I think, has been groundbreaking.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: We've put in a really strong AI program.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: We'll train up everyone to build about 30 people to build their own agents.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing some great stuff there.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've implemented a control tower that looks at 456 metrics across the entire chain and transparency, where we recognize the positive improvements, what's going really well, and we celebrate.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And those that aren't going to target, we drive a conversation that says, What do you need?
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: How can we help from a cross-functional perspective through not?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think where metrics have been used historically and elsewhere, where they are a beating tool to say naughty naughty, that's not going well, you're bad.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Here it's like, how can we help?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that cultural change is what we've driven most at Stanford, and it's really paying dividends.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had a Medline fire recently, uh, back in June, where our 1 million square foot warehouse from Medline burnt down completely.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: We were 95% just in time.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Same day delivery, it came across through.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had zero cases canceled.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: We implemented a command center within four hours.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: We we were watching with all of our metrics that chain, we knew where the pain points are, and we implemented with our resiliency program immediate steps for alternate suppliers.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how do we bring the product in across?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's examples like that that makes me really proud that putting those foundational things in a process, of metrics of governance, but it's that cross-functional transparency that I think is the core to ensuring you've got a well-run, efficient supply chain that is adaptable.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'll tell you something, Omar.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're coming to the end of our time here, but I can I I feel relatively confident in saying this.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think I have I know that I have learned more in the last 30 minutes talking to you than you learned in the 87 or 90 episodes of me that you listen to.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's no no question of that.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if I were Stanford uh medicine, I wouldn't uh um uh allow us to uh publish this podcast because every system in America is gonna be calling you up to uh uh see what you can do for them because I think you've done a heck of a job of implementing some stuff, and uh this has been very informative.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I thank you so much for talking to me and and uh and engaging me because had you not done that, I wouldn't have been able to uh meet such an interesting person and and put it out there for folks to learn from.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Fred, absolutely appreciate it.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'm gonna echo that back to you through.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I started through in March.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I was going to Tahoe every weekend with my daughters who were from Santa Cruz, um, who are on a snowboarding team.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a four-hour drive.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they got sick and tired of me listening to you on those calls as we're interviewing, as you're interviewing through with healthcare.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wow, the the stories that you bring out and the lessons from that.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what I would leave with is the echo point of healthcare supply chains are amazing, they're complex, we're mission-driven, etc.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the solutions are out there in the other industries.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the solutions have been done before, and so it's you leading things like podcasts and enabling people to learn and understand how can we employ, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: How do we bring those into our organization and just give it a go?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Try trial something, pilot it, test it.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: You will learn more from giving it a go and doing something new than by engineering and trying to solve it over a six-month process.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks again, Omar.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, this has been a uh great day for me talking with you, and I hope that the folks out there listening will enjoy it as much as I have.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you continued success there.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: I hope your daughter continues to stay healthy and uh things go well for you.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're so happy to have you here, and uh, I hope to see you again soon.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you around.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Fred.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's all for today.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: And don't forget to hit that subscribe button and connect with us online so you'll never miss an episode and can catch up on all the ones you might have missed.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Got a topic you're fired up about, or maybe you want to be a guest on the show?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Fred would love to hear from you.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Just reach out at S C R A N S at S T O N G E.com.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.