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Insights from Tom Redding on Evolving Healthcare Supply Chains · Taking The Supply Chain Pulse

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Hello again everybody.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: This is Fred Kranz from St Onge coming to you with another episode of Taking the Supply Chain Pulse.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Our guest today is Tom Redding.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Tom is the Managing Director of Healthcare Supply Chain for St Onge and Tom has been with the company for quite a while.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I wanted to get some insight from Tom on how he helped build the healthcare supply chain practice and get into the background of that and learn more about Tom and what Tom sees as the challenges and opportunities that the supply chain is going to face in the near and intermediate future.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: So, Tom, thanks for joining us today.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Happy to have you here.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, thanks, fred, Appreciate it.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: It's always a pleasure talking to you.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, thanks.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Why don't you tell us about yourself, give us your background and how you got to St Onge?
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of interesting story.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Obviously, when I went to undergrad many years ago, I had this dream of designing and I tell the story to everybody, by the way um, I was going to design race cars and that's kind of, you know, had this idea of what mechanical engineering was, and I learned pretty quickly that that's not really the case.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: You're not really designing cars, you're designing components of them and assembling them.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: So the actual design of those, um, just the way it goes, uh, or with all the suppliers.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: So I actually I graduated mechanical engineering and didn't really I've really done nothing with mechanical engineering.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Pretty much in my career.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: It's all been around process and efficiency and workflow management, worked for a number of companies and I was working in California, moved back to Pennsylvania you know where I grew up and my neighbor at the time actually was working for a 3PL with St Onge and I had told him that I was looking for another position, you know more of kind of a process engineer, industrial engineer kind of role and introduced me to St Onge and you know I applied and you know, honestly, two weeks later I was working at St Onge and at the time they had said, hey, we're, you know just kind of standing up this healthcare practice.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: This was in 2007,.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: I joined, just starting up the practice.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: And you know, are you interested in healthcare?
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: I said I have no idea what that means, but yeah, I'm all game for learning something new.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: So again, 17 years later, here I am, fred.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: So a lot of, a lot of change.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: You know a lot of growth in the company, a lot of growth in the healthcare team from you know three or four folks of us.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: You know the healthcare team to.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: You know north of 40, you know close to 45 people now.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll get into that a little later.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: I looked through your LinkedIn page and I saw that you graduated from Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Right yeah, Did you drink the water while?
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: you were there, I did.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's probably why I always kind of wink every once in a while.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: It's not because I'm winking at you, no, it was funny.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: I I don't remember drinking the water when I was in flint.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: But, yes, definitely a sad situation for sure.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Well see, I got a similar excuse.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: I was in camp lejeune during the times that they were poisoning people with their water too, so I know how you feel.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: The other thing is, I went through your um, um, your bio and I didn't see.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: I I've I've heard you talk about the fact that you used to be on Baywatch, and it's not in your, it's not in any of this stuff here.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Could you tell us about that?
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so many, many years ago.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure if you're, if you heard of the show Baywatch, but, um, I was.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: I was one of the uh, one of the actors.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: I wasn't actually saving people, but I was in the show and, as many of you guys know, the show ended and, as all of us do in the healthcare supply chain, we constantly pivot.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: So I'm constantly pivoted again and that's kind of where it is.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: I actually said that story recently at a conference and somebody actually came up to me and said I never realized that you were on Baywatch and I said, yeah, me either.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Like you weren't.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: I'm like no, I was like it was a joke, and they're like, oh, okay, oh, no wonder it wasn't there.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: I couldn't, I wouldn't.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: I knew I'd heard you tell that story, that you're there and I.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Well, the thing is, fascinating fred, just for two seconds is that I had said that many years ago when I was at hymns I I used that.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: That's the story.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: I was on panel discussion and it was fascinating because you have, the audience is laughing, the other half the audience is looking up what baywatch is.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah, that's the problem that you're a young guy still, you're going to find out when you get older all the references that you used to use, that everybody understood.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: They don't know a damn thing you're talking about when you mention things you know like.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: So you have to be careful with that.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: But when you did get involved in the healthcare practice, what was the first project you worked on?
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was working on a kind of a hospital expansion project for Duke.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: It was actually Duke North Tower that they built many years ago and it was really kind of helping design the materials, management spaces and you know, all the kind of support service spaces.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: So for me it was like you know, obviously I'd been in a hospital in the emergency department or you know those types of things but I'd never had any experience in that and I was certainly willing to learn and you know we had done a number of projects at that point, you know.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: So I got some good guidance from Sean and others on the team to do that work, but it was kind of it was kind of a neat experience, quite honestly, because I had never been to a hospital behind the scenes, I'd never understood those types of things, but having the support and guidance and you know, kind of fast forward kind of where we are today.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: It's pretty neat.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and what?
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: What did you?
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: What did you learn there about healthcare that was different than what you had imagined.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: You'd find close for manual I came from.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: Prior to St Ange, I'd worked at a manufacturing company that used, you know, vision and robotics and to think about, you know what I was doing prior to St Ange and then, you know, working on that first project, it was just crazy to think like, wow, this thing is kind of it's very rudimentary.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: But again, I think you know the industry is, you know, 20 plus years behind and certainly there's a lot of change that happened since then.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: But yeah, it was just, it was just very rudimentary, just kind of the basics and how things operate and function.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: You know, back then, Did you have to sort of dumb down what you knew to get people to understand what you're trying to accomplish and do things that you starting in a place behind where you would normally start if you had gone into a traditional supply chain operation?
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean you definitely have to.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: I mean it's I'm saying you have to take a step back.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: You just have to.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: Really, you have to think differently.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: It's just through a different lens that you're kind of looking at the world and again it's easy to apply what you did before and say, hey, this is what it should be.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: But in reality it's like you have to.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: You want to move the needle, you want to move things forward, but again you have to make sure that it's it's grounded, based on you know what's what's real, what's not real yeah, I, I didn't mean to use the term dumbed down in a bad way.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It was sort of like star trek 4, when they went to save the whales and sc Scotty had to pick up the computer and he talked to the computer and nothing happened.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: And they they said use the mouse.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: And he picked up the mouse and he's trying to talk to the mouse.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: That's sort of like where health care was in relation to other supply chains.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I guess you came in around.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I did the math somewhere around 2007, I guess would be when I joined, yeah yeah, and that's uh, you know that's relatively recently and a lot of places were, you know, far along with leading supply chain practices and, like you say, we were still largely manual at that time.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: So, about St Onge, our healthcare practice, I know, since you've had a lot of input in building it, for the folks out there that don't know about it, our practice, as is divided into two sectors we have architectural new builds or renovations, and then projects aimed at improving existing operations.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Give us an idea the difference between those two types of projects yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously the big difference is, you know, from a design build, or you know, designing a new facility is that you have a kind of a, to a certain degree, blank canvas on.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: You know what could you do, what should you do.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: You know, operationally, technology-wise, system-wise, you know just material flow-wise, you can think about maybe how things should be done and design it from an ideal situation where, when we're in operational mode, we're moving, we're going into a health system, a lot of those, the physical plan is fixed again.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: We don't have the liberties to move walls, we don't have the liberties to widen the corridors, we don't have the the option many times.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: So we really have to think creatively like how do you improve throughput, how do you improve the reduced number of touches?
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: All those things have to be considered as part of it.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: So I think from one is just kind of like a blank sheet of paper versus yeah, you have constraints and how do you kind of address those and still move the needle with knowing that some of the things can't move, especially with walls and some of those physical things yeah, you know, uh, I think you probably have to get involved in a lot of education while you're going into either of these projects.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: I, um, I, I know that the architectural side probably architects, uh, may just design x number of square feet for a function without any idea of, uh, what, what things are required to be where, and stuff like that, and, by the same token, somebody that might decide all of a sudden oh, we want to have an automated guided vehicle or something in our place.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: We're going to put that in.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: You have to go in and sort of educate folks on the requirements and lead them down the path to help them make the right decisions.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Is that fair to say?
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's 100% right, fred.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think if you think about where we are in a design project, it takes a few years to get through the design project.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: It takes a few years to construct a building.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: You could be designing something that opens in six or seven years from now and the technologies are changing.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: You know the building to be able to adapt to those changes have to be considered.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of education of folks to say this is what we're doing today.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: We want to try to incorporate it into a new building or a new facility.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: But it's really taking kind of break down those barriers to say, listen, in five to seven years from now the world can be very different.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: You know, from a technology standpoint, how AI is going to impact us, how robotics are going to impact us.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: All those things In the built environment you have to plan for.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: It doesn't just happen by you know figuring out later.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: I mean you have to plan for it and those are things that require some education.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: I mean you have to plan for it and those are things that require some education.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: And how many of those new builds build in the opportunity for growth?
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: I know that, dennis Mullins, when he was at Indiana University, I was out there when they were building their distribution center and they built, I don't know, I think it was like 300,000 square feet, it may not have been that.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Whatever it was, they were using about 25% of the space they were allotted when they opened up their initial operation, which gave them room to expand.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Are most of the organizations we deal with that forward thinking enough to be able to do that?
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: Not always.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's probably.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: It's probably a mix, probably a coin flip the summer, thinking about the expansion and how do we grow into the building we have or be able to expand the building?
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: I think there are some health systems a little more progressive and they know that if you do it, if you think about it right now and you lay the groundwork, it'll make it way easier to adapt the building down the road or expand.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: Or you know, and you lay the groundwork, it'll make it way easier to adapt the building down the road or expand.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: Or you know, if you think about a campus is getting bigger in the next 10 to 15 years, you know where you put the dock to support the growth of the campus is critically important.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: And if you're not, if you're just putting everything at like, hey, I just have construction costs and I can just do it right now.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: This is going to solve my issue Again.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Too many times there's like laser focus from a budget standpoint but they're missing the entire long-term plan of a campus.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Or they're missing the long-term plan of the building and how it can again, how it has to adapt to support the business.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've worked with a lot of organizations that are existing and that are taking that approach to try to plan the next 5, 10, 15 years, and I think, quite honestly, I think those are the exception rather than the rule.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: I think most of the regular small to midsize IDNs are just sort of getting by day to day and don't have the luxury of being able to plan that far ahead.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: But at St Ons the thing that has struck me since I've been here is that you build a strong health care team and that team combines the skills of industrial engineers as well as people with health, healthcare operational backgrounds.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: So we have folks that and we have the third aspect, and that is the expertise of the folks that are on the non-healthcare side of the practice.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: That we can always draw on as well.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: You know how does that combination of skill sets help us to bring more value to the customers?
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, no, we definitely have come a long way as a company, especially as a healthcare practice.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: You know, for many years we really didn't talk to anybody.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: If you weren't an engineer, we really weren't interested in talking to you.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: And I think what we came to the conclusion you know through, you know, interacting with others as part of projects is that, again, there is multiple mindsets.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: So the ability to think about not just this is how you would design it.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: You know, like you, fred, like you always say, a linear thinker, if you were a linear thinker, this is kind of how you would do it.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: I think there's also an aspect of it is like how does this thing, how do you actually operationalize this thing?
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: How do you actually get it up and running?
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: How do you make sure that we have the right people that have been in the role of a director, have been in the role of, you know, whatever operations role there is, and they've been.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: They can see it from their perspective to say, hey, I've been on a design build, I've been involved in these types of projects.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: These are the areas that we've struggled, once the building has opened, and how do we incorporate all those different perspectives.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: So I think we've kind of evolved past the industrial engineer.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: I think we've kind of, you know, with an operations mindset.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: I think is definitely, you know, we have more and more folks on the team that have that kind of direct experience.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: I think there's also another component to it which is more of the analytical, so have that additional analytical rigor that we can bring to projects beyond just kind of the basic problem solving.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: So I think between those kind of three things have been incredibly important for us to kind of, you know, make sure that we're raising our game, we're being able to tackle problems, bigger problems, more complicated problems and move the needle versus again, you might have a very specific mindset and we have to bring you know different perspectives to the table.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: And we've done that and we have to bring you know different perspectives to the table and we've done that and we continue to do that.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're bringing you know.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: My observation is for you folks that out there that would have no way of knowing this, we have a weekly healthcare team meeting and in that team meeting we exchange ideas and talk about projects and basically get input from all the folks that are in the practice.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: What are we about?
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: 40 people in the practice right now.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're approaching 45, yeah.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: And it's amazing to see the insights and the knowledge.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: And sometimes for the young kids, you know the naivete that they have about health care.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: You know I mean, I got almost 60 years so you laugh at some of the things they say.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: But we have once again experienced operations.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Folks there that do have the experience and help teach those guys and it's a real unique chemistry that goes on among the group.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: I'm really excited about it, yeah, so I think the big thing, fred, we also, again, we have a number of you know, obviously we're an independent engineering firm and consulting firm, but I will say that, again, our ability to stay ahead of what technology and systems are going on and you know what's being developed, what's coming out, what's working, what's not working, again, I think that's incredibly important, as you shared, fred, that information you know sharing with the team, you know sharing, you know sharing what's changing, you know what the impact is to our work or what you know what's coming down.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: The line is we have to stay ahead.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and those youngsters are just bright.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So here's the thing with health care.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: When I came into the business, health care was acute care centric.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: The hospital was everything.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: In fact, there were very few what really what you would call systems.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: There were thousands of community hospitals and in materials management there was no supply chain.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: It was materials management.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: All you had to do was know enough how to back the truck up to the dock, pull the stuff off and push it to the place where things need to get to so the patient can receive care.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Well, now healthcare is transitioning from that acute care centric model to one in which the care is being pushed out to and including the home, and you know what pressures will that put on the supply chain.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I just did a recent podcast on this whole this topic alone.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: I think this is a topic, I think, where healthcare leaders, supply chain leaders, either they're staying behind you know they're falling behind or they're trying to get ahead, or just, you know, kind of hoping that they can retire before the supply chain really changes on them.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: But I think that the fact that you can look at a health system and they might have, you know, 250 different locations, clinical locations, in their network, that those requirements, each one of those facilities, the complexities, the number of items, the types of supplies, the variability that goes, it's getting harder and harder by the day.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: And if you layer in the going to the home, today we can buffer a lot of supplies, we can put a lot of supplies in supply rooms or in closets, whatever within the hospital or these different ambulatory sites.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: But if you're going to the home, it's really about service and it's really about making sure that you can predict the needs versus hey, I'm going to send you an extra two or three boxes of this stuff just in case you need it, and the amount of waste would be tremendous.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And if health systems don't think about the model as a service-based model versus today it's a transactional-based model and it's like, hey, we're just getting the supplies in, we're getting them on the shelves, we're trying to do a good job managing.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: When you get into the home it's a totally different animal and if logistics and supply chain are not in sync with clinical care, it will directly impact again the ratings for the health systems.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: It'll direct impact the quality of care they're getting all those things.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: Systems it'll direct impact the quality of care they're getting all those things.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: And I again I said this at a conference last year that you fast forward 10 years you know supply chain logistics is going to be the number one driver of the deliberative care and if and if equipment's showing up late, pharmaceuticals are showing up late, wearables are showing up late or they're not synchronized and that delays, you know, patient care and and and get making clinical decisions like game over.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: Like health systems you're going to.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: You know there's they're going to move to somewhere else because I can get care from someone else.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: Someone else will show up to my house or or be able to get on a team's meeting and and teams you know online meeting and to be able to have a conversation with a clinical team member.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: I mean all those things that can quickly kind of adjust and move and not have to deal with it.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Well, the interesting part about that is that, historically, the healthcare supply chain has outsourced two of its most important components.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: They've outsourced purchasing and contracting, especially for commodity items, to the GPOs, and they've outsourced purchasing and contracting, especially for commodity items, to the GPOs, and they've outsourced logistics and distribution and transportation to the distributors and 3PLs.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: So the real question is A what do folks need to learn?
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And B are they going to be able to learn it fast enough to do the job successfully as the care goes out to the home?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: I would not.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: I myself, for example, still can't get my head around how you can deliver medication to me via drone.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, when I'm worried about someone stealing the Amazon box off my front porch, how the hell am I going to know that my critical heart medication is going to be there and not take it?
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, these are things that these are skill sets that have to be added, that aren't currently present in many of the supply chains out there.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's very real, fred, like I was just sharing with Janet from HPN on her podcast, that even if you fast forward and you think about the number of drones under 400 feet and FAA, all these individual hospitals and businesses, and the sky is going, there's going to be so many things that are moving and the coordination of those activities is going to be extremely important.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: You could say today, like moving aircraft from, you know, from Baltimore to San Diego, requires a certain amount of coordination and effort and discussion in the future.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: You're multiplying it by many, many times and to be able to move things you know, either seamlessly to and from and not deal with the traffic and the movement and potential implications of having drones flying you know thousands and thousands of drones potentially down the line it's a very real concern.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: And if health systems and leaders don't understand you know, that level of service and you mentioned earlier about, like the distributor network, I mean I think today it's very, very fragmented.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: It's incredibly important to understand that.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: You know you look at the pharmaceuticals fragmented DMEs fragmented.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: You look at medical surgical distributions fragmented.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: If you tried to think about it more holistically and said, okay, how do we integrate all these different distributors.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: It falls on the hands and the shoulders of the health systems and they're going to have to figure it out.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: The large companies that are Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 10 companies they're going to stay in their silo unless something majorly changes and I think the health systems are going to have to take it.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: They're going to have to think about how to integrate all those and I would say most leaders are not ready for it.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so what you're saying.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: You know I get a picture of this when I was a kid.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I used to see things in the future where everyone had flying cars and they were just like you described, all over the city.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: What's to keep kids from slingshots in the summertime, when they're bored, going outside and shooting down the stuff that's being delivered by the drones?
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: It's easier to accomplish the possibility of doing it than it is to implement the actuality of doing it.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: I believe yeah and do it at scale, and do it at such larger scale that it becomes available to anybody.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: So when we go into places now people are asking us.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: We all have our catchphrases that we don't really understand and we use them in sentences anyway.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: People say well, we want to incorporate AI and robotics into our operation.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Wow, how do we go about that?
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So what do you see as AI and robotics being able to bring to the supply chain over the next five to 10 years, and how do you think we'll go about implementing that?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think from an AI standpoint, I mean, obviously there's you know, I would call you know more of the what I would call more predictive methods, if you want to call it that.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: But it's really about how do you get visibility of the demand, the demand signal, and how do you communicate that, and proactively communicate that with the suppliers.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: And I think you know, breaking down those barriers between the health system, the provider and those suppliers and manufacturers.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: I think is where AI can be that conduit, because, again, the whole thing around AI is like getting that visibility and movement and doing it proactively to say, can I predict that my usage, can I start to manage and send that information back to the manufacturers and distributors, information back to the manufacturers and distributors.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: I think you're going to find more and more where you know the idea of, you know, minimizing all the touches along the supply chain.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: You know why have A, b and C people doing certain things and then it goes to the next person, then it goes to something else and then it has to go to the distributor through EDI and then it has to come back and then it.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: But at some level you'd have to say, well, you know, ai can be that conduit to make those connections from the end-to-end supply chain and to be able to do it seamlessly, versus all these manual processes that are happening today, get to a point where it's like I know what I need and it's not somebody trying to figure it out.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Nobody's going to a supplier to figure it out.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: I think when you try to tie that into some sort of robotics, I think I mean robotics is an interesting one because theoretically and again I'm just talking, you know, in general, ideally what could happen is, you know, I, I could, an order could be generated that I need for patient xyz, and that that could be sent to something and and a robot could pick everything for them, could put it into a toad, could put into a box, could put into whatever medium you want.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: It could be shipped to somebody via drone, it could get delivered and it could be, you know, from, via robot, delivered to wherever it needs to go in a hospital.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: So if you think about it in that context, like the ability to reduce all those touch points goes away and, by the way, I have visibility of where it is.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: When is it showing up?
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Like the reliability is key I do at times.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: I think it's really cool stuff.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: I think you know the industry is changing and and there's a lot of potential out there.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: But I think at some level you have to say do you go too far with it?
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: Do you get to a certain point where it's like you I forget I was talking to somebody recently it's like I want, I want AI to say I need pizza.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: I want AI to know that I, that I need Chinese tonight, and I get home and the Chinese is sitting on the table because it showed up, it was on the plate and it, it.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: The window opened up and the thing flew in, put it right on the right on the table and life is good.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: You know, I come home, I got some, I got my Chinese.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: I didn't even know I needed Chinese.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: You know, like there is a point where it's like it can go a bit too far and you become so reliant on it.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: But I do think there's ways and methods to kind of move the needle.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was talking to two guys.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: I talked to Randy Bradley.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: I talked about the idea of Manchine, which is robots that cooperate with humans and to get tasks done, and today I was talking to Eric Fritch from Mayo, and they have a thing going on where they're checking out the possibility of robots assisting things being moved through the warehouse.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: They've done studies on how much human power they said their guys are walking around six miles a day and with the proper implementation of robots into the process, they could cut that down to three to four miles a day and improve the quality of the output of the people as well as the machine.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: So doing things wisely, I think, is the key to bringing the stuff on instead of just saying, oh, we got to have one of those and not knowing what you're going to do with it.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly Like you say.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: It's like Jeopardy, bingo, you know, for purchasing.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: There's a point where it's like, yeah, I mean, what are you really trying to solve?
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: And again, if there's labor shortages and everything else, it's like how do you kind of mitigate that?
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Yep For you folks out there who have never heard me say this as a supply chain leader, I often found myself involved in what I would call jeopardy purchasing.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: In the old days when the doctors had control of everything, they would tell you what they wanted and then you had to ask the questions that would give them the answer that they wanted, and a lot of times that comes out with healthcare.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: They'll see something they want.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Whether it's right or not is completely aside from the point, and they don't check it out enough, and hopefully one of the things that we help people do is make good decisions.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: So, Tom, what do you think the next great challenge for the supply chain is?
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: supply chain is yeah.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: So I think the.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: I think the next kind of evolution of supply chain is it's not maybe it's an operational thing, but it's it's really about how does, how does supply chain be involved as a key decision maker, or whether it is a seat at the table to help drive the strategy of the organization.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: I think there's so many things that are going on in a health system that the supply chain team is just simply handed on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: I think from where things are going and how supply chain can be an enabler.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: I think being at the strategy sessions and working through those things and making sure that, if it's managing more of the contracts or it's being more service oriented, I think is going to be a requirement going forward and being able to track performance and being able to provide that high level of service that's expected.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: Again, if I order something online and I had no visibility of when it was showing up and, by the way, I thought it was coming in a week and it showed up three weeks later I'd be so frustrated.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: And again, if health, if healthcare supply chain doesn't get beyond that current model, again the systems are going to fail because again they're getting further and further and further away from the health system and again, if they can, they can get ahead of it and start putting things in place and helping be part of that decision-making process.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: They'll be in a much better position.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: If they don't, I think most many of the health system leaders, at least from a supply chain standpoint, will be left behind or they'll be forced to retire, and the real challenge of that is it's a terrible thing to say, I'll say it so you don't have to but the reason that most supply chain leaders are not in the C-suite is that they haven't demonstrated the capability of being there, and historically that's been the nature of the leaders.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: Folks like me I worked my way up from working as a nursing assistant.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Now, however, we are getting people into the supply chain with formal supply chain training and with formal healthcare supply chain training and the quality of the people that are coming in is much better prepared than the folks like me that had to learn everything on our own along the way.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, we did the best we could with what we had, but I think that right now we're turning out, the young folks that are coming into the supply chain are really exciting to see and much better prepared than most of my cronies, that's for sure.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: No, but again, I think there's so much potential for supply chain, whether it's you know somebody's getting some formal education, whether they're you know growing up in the ranks, or you know taking on more responsibility or you responsibility, or seeing where the future can go and helping drive it.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: I think the future is bright.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: I'll give it that.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: There's plenty of opportunity out there, yeah, and you've done a great job, tom.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to see how we continue to grow the practice here.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: I think more and more people are becoming more and more aware that they have to do their homework before they do things in supply chain, and that's a really encouraging thing too, and with folks like you and the healthcare supply chain team that we have at St Onge, I think we can be a part of a positive change for the industry along the way.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: So I just want to thank you for being on the podcast.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to have you here, and you know we'll have you again sometime in the future.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Sounds good.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: Thanks, fred, always a pleasure, yep.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Thank you, tom.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: Have a good one, you too.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: Take care.