March 30, 2022 – Speaking to Repertoire about how the pandemic has changed the supply chain permanently, Mark Zacur listed several things:
“Certainly, transparency is much more important than it’s ever been,” said Zacur, who announced his retirement from Owens & Minor as executive vice president and chief commercial officer at the beginning of the year. “Transparency from the perspective of all involved parties – manufacturers, distributors and providers. From the provider perspective – what are their demand signals? Obviously, in a pandemic, it’s dramatically different. But even in normal circumstances, provider demand signals are key. Are they going to have a demand increase because they’re bringing on a new practice or there’s a new initiative around certain procedures, that sort of thing.”
In the pandemic, all parties worked together to optimize PPE supply. Using real-time data helped to identify when there was a product shortage and where to allocate a product, so we could send PPE into hotspots while maintaining continuity of supply in regions that weren’t seeing dramatic spikes.
Similarly, when there’s supply disruption from the manufacturer, the distributor and the manufacturer have to be very open about it and communicate the status proactively to the providers, Zacur said.
“Moving forward, this timely and transparent three-way communication is really critical. I see this with the global supply chain challenges the industry continues to deal with today. Since this is an industry-wide problem and everybody’s in the same boat, the transparency has gotten better. The test will come when as an industry we get back to a sense of normalcy; will the transparency and collaboration commitments still be a priority?”
Zacur said the other piece is the visibility of the Country of Origin for different products. “Providers need to mitigate the risk associated with products originating in distant parts of the world. This complicates the situation and poses questions about alternative product availability, inventory investment, product standardization, etc. Even with U.S. manufactured product, there could be a reliance on components that come out of Asia, for example. Together, manufacturers, distributors and providers need to have a deep understanding of their mutual supply risk and build plans to mitigate those risks.”
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire.