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 … EP 44 – Stanford Medicine’s Amanda Chawla on the People-First Framework behind a 10-Year Transformation

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 … EP 43 – Utz Brands’ Ron Schnur on Outpacing Competitors with Risk-Taking and Supplier Partnerships

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 … EP 42 — St. Luke’s Adrian Wengert on Embedding Medical Directors to Find Cost Savings Buyers Miss

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 relationships and freed category experts to … EP 41 – EBIT Intelligent Procurement’s Joanne McCourt on Measuring Procurement Success beyond Savings

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 … EP 40 – Bon Secours’ Daniel Hurry on Industry Elevation over Retention in Leadership Development

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 physicians to delegate critical … EP 39 – Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Matthew Laud on Diversity in Team & Supplier Selection

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. … EP 38 – Northwestern Medicine’s Gary Fennessy on the Shift to Partnership-Based Healthcare Procurement

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, shares why he’s convinced the answer to indirect spend isn’t another platform but sustained center … EP 37 – Eric O’Daffer on 3 True Norths for AI Investment, Indirect Spend, & Benchmarking

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, and long-term value creation. This partnership … EP 36 – Supplier Data as a Compass, Not a Mirror with Aleck Matambo

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 … EP 35 – Lucid Motors’ Kriti Jain on Maximum Chaos Creating the Best Transformation Conditions