I was talking with Carlos Soares, the newest member of our Medical Devices Group Advisory Board, about supply chain efficiencies for medical device companies.

He observed, “I see a lot of issues that never get resolved until they reach a break point that senior executives must address.” Here’s a short video of our conversation.

Carlos Soares: Hi, I’m Carlos Soares and on March 14^th, I’ll be joining Joe Hage on a webinar to talk about how best to position your strategic cost reduction initiatives for medical devices companies. You’ll walk away with an understanding of what influences the C-Suite by taking a look at EBITDA and growth, understanding what a large-scale transformation would look like, and walking away with a few tools that would help you on your journey.

Joe Hage: Yes, I’m looking forward to it, Carlos. You told me about your experience with Alcon, Philips, and Boston Scientific. You’re often brought in to help when…

Carlos Soares: … you’re experiencing some sort of supply chain pain. You haven’t figured out how to overcome it. You can’t put a value behind it and you can’t convince your C-Suite that it’s time to get it fixed.

Joe Hage: Okay, so after you help sell in this plan, are you done or are you still helping?

Carlos Soares: Oh, I’m still helping, absolutely!

Joe Hage: Doing what?

Carlos Soares: If we have an agreement on what the direction is, on what the objectives are, our scope, then typically I will go in and help do an assessment to understand what the business case is, gaps, put together a roadmap, and then help with the implementation as appropriate.

For example, they may be struggling to reduce cost. I can go in and help them reduce the cost of goods sold or G&A costs.

You typically look at this either as a direct or an indirect in the procurement world and so what I can do is look at how is it that you’re purchasing.

Are you efficient in your purchasing? Are you aggregating all of your spends and then are you leveraging your spend in the marketplace, negotiating the best rates, the best terms, with the best vendors, and the best products? So I can help you through that process all the way up through contracting.

If you are installing a new supply chain, if you have a new distribution system that you put in place, there’s actually quite a bit of process organizational work that needs to be done that I can also support and will. That’s essentially what I do.

I have a very different way of looking at problems given that I’ve had experience in procurement, supply chain strategy, and operations excellence so I can go into a procurement environment and see where waste is helping you efficiently purchase. I can go to supply chain strategy, look at your network with suppliers, consolidate them and then leverage the procurement process to help you implement it. I’ve done that before and it’s quite effective. I’m in operations excellence.

I can help you pretty much in any business process, manufacturing process, streamline, reduce wait times, reduce lead times, eliminate waste, and you just become that much more efficient. That I can just leverage in any space. That’s what I do.

Joe Hage: That was excellent, thank you. For whom will our webinar be most relevant?

Carlos Soares: The conversation will be particularly relevant for the C-Suite, senior executives such as the VP of Supply Chain and Operations, their direct reports, managers in manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and business process managers. I appreciate you listening, and I look forward to seeing you on March 14.

Joe Hage: This broadcast was brought to you by MDTX, the Medical Device Technology Exchange. Meet me and Carlos Soares at MDTX, April 3-5 in Secaucus, New Jersey, at the Meadowlands where Carlos will present “Medical Device Procurement Excellence: What is it and how it drives your EBITDA,” April 4th at the Meadowlands.

You can register for that webinar now at https://medgroup.biz/supplychain and, if you miss the live event, no problem! We’ll make the replay and slides available for you right away.