As Director, Consolidated Services Center, Supply Chain Services for Banner Health, Jessica Carrillo’s role entails overseeing both the IDN’s consolidated services center as well as an offsite distribution building.
What’s unique about running Banner Health’s self-distribution center and logistics center?
With Banner being the largest healthcare provider in Arizona, we support 17 hospitals utilizing our Arizona based warehouses. We also support our hospitals outside of Arizona when their normal distribution channels through a national distributor or direct orders with a supplier are disrupted. We have the leverage to reach out and support them.
Something else unique in my role is the partnership with Banner’s contracting and clinical teams at a corporate level. We work together frequently whether through disruptions that arise or a contract negotiation to really capture contracting expertise, the clinical side of our business as well as operations. My team not only oversee operations and workflows from receiving into the warehouse, storage and outbound, we also work at the corporate level, focused on the vision and strategy of our senior leaders.
What have the last few years been like working with disruptions in the supply chain?
It has been constant. I would say that for Banner, we’ve been able to strategize on a lot of critical supplies and ensuring that we have a safety stock or healthy inventory so that if there is a disruption, whether it be a few weeks or even a month or two, we often have strong inventory so that we have time to plan not only contractually where we go to look for alternate supplies, but also clinically to vet and review alternatives. The disruptions have been constant, but we are continuously looking to grow what type of products we stock, ensuring the most critical are being assessed.
Looking at your career to date, is there anything that you consider your first big win, either at Banner Health or supply chain in general?
Within supply chain, focus is around disruption and how to respond. We spend a lot of energy there, but what has been exciting for me was a project implementing a warehouse management system.
During the COVID years, we also had a long-term initiative to improve our technology within the distribution center, going from our paper-based manual processes to system-based through a warehouse management system. In 2023, towards the end of the year, we implemented the new technology. And, over a four-day period, we lifted our team off paper picking where they were filling orders off manual pick sheets to electronic-based handheld devices.
While implementation was four-days, it took us eight to nine months of planning and thorough process review and development. For me that was one of the most successful projects because not only as a team did we succeed in change management, really pulling together to focus on that end goal, but we have been reaping the benefits ever since. We have seen a flawless accuracy in our order fill rate; always above 99% daily. That is where a picker can go to a location and fulfill 99% of the orders that come through. Our inventory accuracy rates have also drastically improved.
Having that visibility in your hands, especially with inventory in multiple facilities, knowing exactly where everything is – the quantities, the expiry dates – has been a huge leverage for our operation to plan better, to maintain inventory and better rotate safety stock. WMS has given us the transparency and control necessary to ensure scalability and stability for our operation.
What do you see as the biggest stress points for the U.S. healthcare system? How supply chain can find solutions to help?
There are two primary areas that we focus on to relieve the burden in supply chain. One is the continued focus on cost savings with low margin. To eliminate that concern we try to focus on less complexity in the variety of supplies. In other words, standardization.
With the self-distribution center, we focus on resiliency by having enough resources in our warehouse, whether that’s 60 or 90 days of supply. But we also want to focus on formulary items, something that every hospital is using or that is critical when a patient presents themselves through our emergency department.
The second area is the overall disruptions that we continue to face. That is why we are focused on our vision of growth and trying to be as resilient as possible and be able to support the most critical items.