Smarter Sourcing

When over 250,000 patients are mortally injured by medical error annually, supply chain has a direct stake that most organizations underestimate. Charlie Miceli , Former VP Network Chief Supply Chain Officer at University of Vermont Health Network , spent over 15 years in a role that reached well beyond procurement.  Charlie and Eric O'Daffer cover AI as healthcare supply chain's new ERP inflectio...

When Kevin Gordon joined Grady Health System four years ago, he inherited a supply chain function that lacked credibility, documented processes, and modern technology. Before asking for a single dollar, he ran a structured assessment across four pillars: people, processes, finances, and technology. That sequence mattered. Everything that followed, including a full ERP migration from PeopleSoft to...

Ben Haygood built his healthcare supply chain career from the ground up, starting on third shift stocking an ER at 19. Now, as Director of Strategic Sourcing at Piedmont Healthcare , the largest healthcare system in Georgia, he runs a centralized sourcing operation spanning 27 hospitals that has grown from 8 facilities in just 8 years. His perspective on supply chain is grounded in one consistent...

Regine Honoré Villain spent 30 years inside complex enterprise environments watching brilliant strategies get handed off and quietly die. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because nothing was built to catch it. That gap between execution and organizational adoption is now the core focus of her advisory firm, REHVÉAL, and it reframes how she evaluates everything from AI readiness to vendor pa...

Jason Moulding , Chief Supply Chain Officer at MultiCare Health System , has spent 25 years building toward a supply chain function that leads M&A integrations, runs enterprise performance analytics, and holds its position at the executive table through leadership transitions. He walks through the strategic planning model he's been running since 2017 and how 3 iterations of a 5-year plan gave...

Yisa Wong , VP of Strategic Sourcing at Fossil Group , has spent over 20 years building sourcing operations across fashion and accessories, with stops at Liz Claiborne, Gap, Coach, and now Fossil Group, where she's based in Hong Kong managing APAC sourcing and procurement. She talks through how she thinks about supplier relationships, supply chain risk, and what it actually takes to build a sourci...

Teresa Dail , Chief Supply Chain Officer Emeritus - President at Vanderbilt Health Purchasing Collaborative , spent 17 years as an ICU nurse and nursing leader before being hired back to Orlando Health to close what she describes as a "Grand Canyon" of disconnect between materials management and clinical teams. That background shaped her entire approach for Vanderbilt. The physician-led...

CPOs are navigating two pressures at once right now: figuring out where AI actually fits in their operations, and keeping their teams motivated through what feels like unending disruption. Michael Dunlap , Head of Content and Growth, ProcureCon Events at Worldwide Business Research , runs around 30 research calls with procurement practitioners before building each conference agenda, which means he...

Chair of Supply Chain Management Jim Francis , has led Mayo Clinic 's supply chain for 27 years and built something almost no health system has: a commercial operation with eight revenue-generating businesses that now offset 73% of supply chain operating costs. Jim shares the keys to successful healthcare supply chain commercialization, his annual strategic planning discipline, and why he believes...

During COVID, Stamford Health built inventory dashboards that updated multiple times per day to track supplies arriving in bulk quantities at unpredictable intervals from new vendors. This real-time visibility transformed clinical leadership's perception of supply chain from back-office function to operational intelligence center.  Shenelle Padarat-Singh , Director of Strategic Sourcing, expla...

Procurement's biggest misconception isn't about the work itself; it's about believing your role stops at cost savings. Juliana Saretta , Former VP of US Sourcing at Keurig Dr Pepper , spent 30 years proving that procurement touches every part of the enterprise: growth strategy, cash flow management, brand integrity, and now climate solutions. She shares how when Mott's Applesauce n...

Amanda Chawla , SVP - Chief Supply Chain & Post Acute Care Officer at Stanford Health Care , inherited a supply chain where half the organization was outsourced, basic functions like category management and master data management didn't exist, and clinical staff were calling daily about missing products. Nearly a decade later, Stanford's supply chain has earned department of the year r...

Utz Brands ’ Senior VP/CPO Ron Schnur 's M&A integration framework strategy challenges the standard playbook: across six acquisitions, his team at his previous company, White Wave, diagnosed each deal separately. Some received immediate full integration, others got a soft touch for a few months to protect supplier innovation pipelines that created category advantages. The critical question...

St. Luke’s Health System built a 330,000 square foot consolidated service center with an ASRS featuring 28 automated pickers and nearly 20,000 bins. Adrian Wengert , CSCO & VP of Supply Chain, spent 3 years visiting a dozen health systems before construction, extracting one unanimous lesson: every organization regretted not building bigger. He secured board approval for initially unused space...

EBIT Intelligent Procurement ditched their 50% gain-share model for fixed-fee managed services after recognizing how gain-share creates operational friction: departments paying fees from their budgets start resenting consultants as cost-cutting mercenaries, regardless of actual performance. The fixed-fee pivot quieted the "who really drove this saving?" disputes that derail stakeholder relationshi...

Daniel Hurry , President at Advantus Health Partners & CSCO at Bon Secours Mercy Health, helped  justify building Advantus Health Partners to their board by calculating the admin fee equation, then proving they could negotiate better pricing at their scale. Their commercialization strategy was to skip the crowded commodity categories where another contract for gloves or gowns adds no value, an...

Procurement at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center requires abandoning traditional sourcing language when working with physicians whose primary concern is patient outcomes, not optimization metrics, but Matthew Laud , Director of Strategic Sourcing & Supplier Management, has figured out the translation. Framing procurement's value into clinical terms creates the trust necessary for phys...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Smarter Sourcing: Healthcare, with host Eric O’Daffer . Gary Fennessy , VP & Chief Supply Chain Executive at Northwestern Medicine , has been NM's Chief Supply Chain Officer for over 20 years and brings 44 years of industry experience navigating the transformation from a single academic hospital to a multi-site health system. His operational approach during...

Most health systems report supply chain spend in the high teens while industry data confirms it's actually 35-40% of operating expenses, a measurement gap that systematically undermines investment cases to the C-suite. Eric O'Daffer , Executive Producer for Smarter Sourcing: Healthcare Edition, shares why he's convinced the answer to indirect spend isn't another platform but sustai...

Aleck Matambo 's approach to supplier relationships proved critical during Dell's COVID-era factory relocations. When inventory shortages forced allocation decisions across the industry, suppliers prioritized Dell because of partnerships built long before the crisis. His framework moves beyond transactional cost negotiations to create symbiotic relationships focused on innovation, market insights,...

Kriti Jain , Sr. Director of Indirect Procurement, walked into Lucid Motors to find an indirect procurement function that barely existed — a team in single digits without the infrastructure to support a scaling EV manufacturer competing against established players. Within a year, she built what she calls "indirect procurement 2.0," growing to nearly 30 people globally while establishing frameworks...

LogicSource Board Chairman & Former CFO of Victoria’s Secret Tim Johnson 's three-pillar methodology for collaborative cost cultures centers on objective third-party benchmarking, transparent measurement systems, and positioning procurement teams as strategic partners at the decision-making table. His approach consistently delivered results by focusing resources on growth and innovation rather...

Transactional supplier relationships weren’t working out, so Abhijit Kulkarni , Director of Manufacturing Strategy and Procurement at AMD , and his team shifted to identifying "growth partners" who can scale across AMD's entire product portfolio over three-to-five year horizons.    Abhijit also offer insight on crisis management: AMD runs supply chain stress tests every 3 to 6 months, but he's lea...

Duncan Scott , Sr VP of Strategic Sourcing & Quality at New Balance , manages sourcing and quality for a company that introduces thousands of new footwear and apparel products annually, each requiring specialized manufacturing capabilities that generic suppliers cannot provide. His approach rejects commoditization in favor of deep category expertise and multi-decade supplier partnerships.   Th...

Freya Hurwitz , Director of Procurement at TripAdvisor , manages procurement for TripAdvisor's 3,500 employees across four global brands with just one and half people on her team. Rather than trying to control every transaction, she built scalable systems that empower stakeholders to handle their own procurement while her team focuses on high-impact negotiations.    Freya discusses how her cross-f...