By Jenna Hughes
Behind every smooth-running supply chain is a strong, dedicated team working behind the scenes to get essential products to patients.
As Director of Strategic Analytics and Process Improvement at Henry Schein, Bentley Hudson is well-versed in the collaboration that drives the industry, leading a team within North American supply chain that oversees the company’s regional distribution network.
“This includes five U.S. distribution centers spanning over 2 million square feet. I manage direct operations for our three Canadian facilities and have helped provide strategic oversight for distribution teams in the United Kingdom (England and Scotland), Australia, Germany and Italy,” said Hudson. “This global portfolio is part of a broader Company network encompassing 55 distribution and manufacturing centers worldwide.”
Hudson’s job is to take the large, complex medical distribution network and make it easier to measure, understand and improve. For him, a typical day on the job starts with analyzing data.
“I begin each day by reviewing how our facilities performed the day before and then looking for opportunities to improve efficiency, capacity or accuracy,” said Hudson. “From there, I work with my team and distribution center leaders to solve operational challenges and identify which initiatives to prioritize and what it will take to drive them forward.”
Hudson’s passion for structuring data began long before his career in distribution. From the time he was 7 years old, every morning he would collect the daily newspaper to record the previous day’s Major League Baseball scores by hand.
“I wrote box scores and stats into a spiral notebook,” said Hudson. “It was manual data entry, and I loved it.”
To this day, he says the process of organizing data is still the part of his work in healthcare operations that draws him in.
“A lot of waste in a distribution center is hard to see. It hides inside a number that looks right, or inside a process people have stopped questioning because it has always been done that way,” said Hudson. “I like finding those issues, proving them with data and then helping the team improve the process because of it.”
His goal remains the same every day: to find where the operation is working harder than it should be and fix the process, so his team can spend more time on the work that matters – ensuring healthcare professionals receive the products they need to care for their patients.
“A missed scan or a bad record is not just a data problem,” said Hudson. “Somewhere downstream, it can affect a patient. Recognizing this has changed how I think about accuracy in everything we do.”