Taking The Supply Chain Pulse
St. Onge’s Healthcare Hall of Famer and industry icon, Fred Crans, chats with leaders from all areas of healthcare to discuss the issues of today's- threats, challenges and emerging trends and technologies in a lighthearted and engaging manner.
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We provide comprehensive planning and design services to develop world-class facilities and highly effective support services operations. Our capabilities in hospital supply chain consulting include applied industrial engineering, lean methodologies, systems thinking, and operations research to enable improved patient care and staff satisfaction. We are proud to have worked with over 100 hospitals, including 18 of the top 22 in the US, utilizing diverse design strategies, post-construction implementation, and change management.
Taking The Supply Chain Pulse
Season 2 Kickoff--Fred Crans Reflects on Six Decades of Change
What happens when a would be history teacher's aspirations take an unexpected turn, leading him into the heart of the supply chain industry? Discover the journey of Fred Crans, a former Navy hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War, whose career insights have shaped the field over six decades. Fred sits down with guest interviewer Tom Redding to share his reflections on the evolution of supply chain leadership, contrasting his experiential learning with the formal education of today's industry leaders. His story is a testament to the timeless nature of essential leadership skills, even as the landscape around them continues to shift.
As we embark on the second season of "Taking the Supply Chain Pulse," we're excited to highlight the show's growth under the guidance of Lindsay McCullough. This season promises to explore how advancements in robotics are transforming day-to-day operations, why an optimized supply chain is critical in healthcare delivery, and how innovations in pharmacy are not only improving patient outcomes but also redefining patient care. And of course, we’ll cover the crucial work of the Sterile Processing Department, which ensures the highest standards of hygiene and safety in every procedure.
With over 30 episodes already aired, we aim to continue inspiring and educating our growing community, featuring diverse voices from within the industry and beyond.
Join us as we explore the dynamic world of supply chains and invite our listeners to contribute their ideas for upcoming episodes.
Hello again everybody. This is Fred Kranz from St Onge with another episode of Taking the Supply Chain Pulse. Today we're going to be kicking off our second year of episodes with a little preview about what we hope to accomplish in this year's episodes, and we're going to have a special guest interviewer here. Tom Redding is coming on with a special guest interviewee, who Tom will introduce, and we're also going to have Lindsay McCulloch, who is the driving force behind our podcast, talk with us about what we hope to accomplish over the next year on taking the supply chain pulse. So, tom, take it over. The show's yours.
Speaker 2:Wow, fred, yeah, I'm not even sure I'm qualified to interview you quite honestly, but yeah, we have the well-known Fred Kranz been around for 60-ish years here in the industry, seen a lot of different things throughout, you know, throughout his career. And I guess I'm curious, fred. I mean you've interviewed a lot of people. You've written hundreds, probably thousands of articles. You've talked to hundreds and probably thousands of people in your career. I guess maybe give us some highlights of some things you've done and you know how you've kind of helped kind of move the industry forward.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know if I moved it forward. I think I moved forward with the industry over 60 years. Oh, come on.
Speaker 2:You're not giving yourself enough credit.
Speaker 1:No, I started out Originally when I was a kid growing up in upstate New York. I wanted to be a high school history teacher and I went to college on an academic scholarship and managed to flunk out in two years because I didn't bother to attend class. I chose to drink beer and look for girls, and it had its rewards, but good grades weren't one of them. So I got kicked out of the house for flunking out of school and I decided that I needed to go in the military and I thought the best place to go was in the Navy, because Vietnam was starting up and I didn't want to get in a land war in Asia. And as a college person I was able to choose my specialty. So I said oh look, they have this thing called hospital corpsman. Hospitals are on the ground or they're on a ship and I won't have to worry about going into combat if I become a hospital corpsman. So I became a Navy hospital corpsman and after I was in training for six months, I discovered that the Marine Corps is part of the Navy and the Marines have no medics of their own. Those are all US Navy hospital corpsmen that get sent to the Marines. So a year after I had enlisted I was in Vietnam with an infantry battalion, with the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines in Vietnam, and when I got out of the service went to the University of Miami and I got a job at Baptist Hospital of Miami, which was a 365-bed community hospital out in the Kendall part of South Dade County. I was working as a nursing assistant while I worked my way through school and while I was doing that I was one of two male nursing assistants at the hospital, was one of two male nursing assistants at the hospital and consequently I was quite popular because whenever they needed someone to be lifted or moved in any place in the hospital, they'd call me and I'd have to go help. And also, because I was going to school, I was available to work every single weekend whenever they needed me. So I did whatever the nursing staff wanted and when I finally graduated from the university I had built enough rapport and credibility with the nursing leadership that I got a management position managing the second and third floors non-clinical aspects which meant I was in charge of supplies linen. I even did nurse staffing, which may be the most difficult job I've ever had. That's a tough job and from that I went into. A year later, I became the director of CPD Central Processing Distribution and that's where I started in the supply chain. So my career grew from there.
Speaker 1:I was at Baptist for 12 years and then I moved north to Ohio and I became director of materials management. I never was a VP of supply chain, because the supply chain term didn't come into vogue until I don't know, maybe about 2015 or 2016. And by that time I had gotten beyond leading supply chains to working for ECRI, which was a software as a service organization out of Pennsylvania, and I'd gotten into sales out of Pennsylvania. And I'd gotten into sales. I'd been a consultant with VHA, performance Consulting, with Tom Hughes' company Concepts in Healthcare, with Capgemini, accenture, and ultimately got into business development. And in what?
Speaker 1:2019, I came to St Onge and that's when I really started to learn about supply chain. The one thing that I can say about leaders of my era was unless we came from the military, unless we came from the logistics side of the military not the side I came from, which was the clinical side we didn't know anything about supply chain. We made it up as we went, we learned as we went. Today you don't have that luxury. Today, our industry is being seeded with folks that actually have studied and learned supply chain. So you know that's pretty much my background and I've been here now for five years.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that, fred. I mean certainly. Again, you certainly downplay all the impact you've made over the years and you know, being in the Bellwether League certainly has kind of amplified the fact that you know you are making an impact, whether you believe it or not. You certainly have, I think when you think about all the different leaders and the different positions you've been in, either on the provider side or in a sales role or in a consulting role, I guess, how have you seen the skills needed to be a successful leader from an operational standpoint? How has that changed over the years and what do you think are kind of the key things that those leaders need today?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, the actual basic skills haven't changed. I mean, I had to acquire skills. To tell you the truth, I started out as naive as you can be. I was what? 28 years old when I became a director at a 400-bed hospital in Miami. I'd never been a leader before and this is in a community hospital and I always thought that the leader had to know everything and the most important thing was to be right all the time.
Speaker 1:And I found out very quickly that leadership is much more a political process than it is a knowledge-based process, and you better learn how to work well with other people in order to be able to become a good leader other people in order to be able to become a good leader. And you had to build credibility. And you didn't build credibility by proving yourself right and other people wrong. And it took me probably. I had a mentor named Rusty Slay who was a CFO at Baptist, and he sat me down one day and he told me, fred, he said you're a really bright guy, but you don't need to be right all the time, okay, need to let other people be right now and then. And uh, I learned how to build credibility from from that point. So the the basic leadership skills haven't changed, but the knowledge needed about supply chain has changed. Because when I I started out I go right back to Baptist 400-bed community hospital had a loading dock in a warehouse maybe 20,000 square feet warehouse if that big and all you had to do was know how to back the trucks up to the loading dock, unload them and push the stuff that came off the trucks either into into the warehouse for to be put away or into the staging area to be delivered to the departments that ordered them directly. And you needed to do that well, well enough, and make sure that you didn't run out of supplies and doctors had what they needed when they were going to perform surgery. Logistics was done by the med-surg and pharmacy distributors and purchasing was done by the GPOs for the commodity items especially. So you didn't need to know all that much Today. And we never talked. By the way, interesting thing is we never talked to our suppliers' supply chain no-transcript people that uh got key clients, which were the doctors, the products they needed and uh got him on time and and as long as there were no complaints from the doctors, we must have been doing a pretty good job. So that was all we needed to know that.
Speaker 1:And now today, as IDNs become more and more complex and there are more and more touch points and service areas along the way, cleveland Clinic up here in northeast Ohio has over 100 service locations in northeast Ohio, so that means there are 100 points at which products need to be products, or patients or whatever need to be delivered to on a regular basis in order for them to perform their tasks.
Speaker 1:So you need to have a knowledge of logistics and transportation. I wouldn't have known what that was if you I would have had to look up the meaning of the two words back in 1975, for example. Now it's probably the most important part of the supply chain, as care continues to move toward the point of use, toward the patient's home. And so the things that we need to learn now is and I will quote Richard Bagley from our recent episode with him the key thing that we need to be able to recognize today is talent. If we need to have a logistics expert in our system, then we need to be able to find them, recognize them, hire them and let them do their work. Talent is a big deal. We need to know the components, the specialty components we need in the supply chain, and then we need to be able to find the people that can deliver those components well.
Speaker 2:Sounds good, fred. Yeah, I mean you touched on a lot of points there. I mean I think that it sounds like to your point is early in your career. You know there was some. You know the expectations as a leader was a certain thing and I think as you look at a leader today, the expectations are significantly higher. The knowledge requirements are significantly higher. There's a tremendous amount of training and you know on the job training and education around. You know supply chain logistics and as we look forward, it's going to be even bigger of a deal, you know for the supply chain leaders. I guess how have those roles and responsibilities changed? I know you touched on it, you know, throughout your comments there, but I guess how have you seen those roles and responsibilities change over the last number of years?
Speaker 1:Well, I've seen us having to become responsible for the supply chain, as I said in the past. You know, the distributors were our logistics folks and the GPOs were our contracting folks. But now, if you take a look at what just happened about a month ago with the hurricane, what was it Helene or Milton, whichever one it was that caused the most damage, that disrupted the baxter plant? All of a sudden, we're dealing with, uh, constant disruptions. So the roles now? There are roles for people who uh scan the, uh, uh, the horizon to see what's going on in the world and to uh create contingency plans for what ifs you. If you live in Florida, yep, you've got a what-if plan for a hurricane, because they go through there all the time. If you live in California, you've got a what-if plan for wildfires, I'm sure. But what if a plant in Pakistan goes down and you find out that that's where you're getting key products?
Speaker 1:We have to know more things. So managing data, key products. We have to know more things. So managing data, having analytical skills. These are key roles right now and, from what I've learned when I've been at St Onge, for example, understanding and being able to predict demand accurately can tell you how big of a facility you need as a warehouse or a CSC. By being able to correctly determine demand, then you can correctly size the areas that are needed to support that demand. These are all things we didn't really have to deal with. Someone built the warehouse. It was there when you came to work. No one asked you about it, you just made it work. You know what I mean. Today the folks are much more skilled you've written over the years.
Speaker 2:I mean you've, you've, I mean you've written probably hundreds and thousands of articles. I mean I know that's. I mean that's certainly part of your sweet spot there and the things that you enjoy doing making an impact on the industry, you know, by sharing information. I think you know. I'm just curious on the on the podcast. Obviously you know Sean O'Neill, you know, had the initial kind of idea around the podcast and Lindsay's been kind of the driving force of you know keeping that you know flowing. And this is again, the podcast is something new for you. I guess you know how did, how did you embrace the? You know the podcast, how have you kind of taken it and kind of you know kind of grown the excitement around the podcast and and ultimately we'd like to get to you know what season two looks like. But in the meantime, I guess just maybe give us a little bit of background on you know the initial kind of podcast and how you've kind of taken it. You know to where we are today.
Speaker 1:Well, Sean is the one that came up with the idea about a podcast. He floated it, I think, to Lindsay and I and you about at the same time and I thought, oh, that's neat. And when he said podcast I thought, singular, one podcast, right. And then I started watching the Kelsey kelsey brothers, who are from cleveland heights, where I live, uh, their weekly podcast uh about, uh, pro football and stuff and, and you know they're out every every wednesday morning at 9 30 there's a new new heights uh podcast out there and they got a tremendous following. And then, um, I thought, hey, this is cool. It's not new to me.
Speaker 1:I had a TV show back in the 80s at Timken Mercy in Canton Ohio and I've done a video thing every month. It was an hour and a half show every month that we did and it was a lot of fun and I enjoy talking to people. I know a lot of leaders. I enjoy asking the same question to three different people because you're going to get three different perspectives and that's important. So we started to develop the idea and then my boss came into the picture that's Lindsey, who got the formal education on what podcasts should look like, the idea that we have to have a rigor of putting things out every week. We do it every week on Thursdays and she set the framework up and then I started just to contact people to have them come on the podcast and it's been excellent.
Speaker 1:I mean it had a whole slew of really really excellent top-notch leaders on so far and we've been able to expose people across the country who are working for a living every day that don't get to go to all the meetings we get to go to and that would never get to meet Steve Downey of the Cleveland Clinic or Ed Hiscock of Trinity or you or any of these people otherwise be able to meet, listen and be exposed to the knowledge that you folks can share with them. And that's, I think it's. I get really stoked about it and it's worth it. It's a really meaningful thing, fulfilling thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, fred, one thing you share with me I don't know kind of early on, and certainly it's resonated with me is that everybody, everybody has their story and some people are open to sharing their story and their journey and other people are not, and that's certainly understandable. But again, I think, as we look to season two, I guess just maybe want to turn it back to you to kind of think about you know, what is the, you know between you and Lindsay, I guess, what do you see season two looking like? I mean, what do you see Season 2 looking like? How do we frame that up for the folks?
Speaker 1:Well, Lindsay, you better come in and say hello now We've been talking about you, so let's introduce yourself, Lindsay.
Speaker 3:Tell us who you are and what your role at St Onge is, if you would Sure, hey, fred, so.
Speaker 1:I'm Lindsay. I do marketing for St Onge and I've been working hand-in-hand with you and Sean and Tom and Joe Nemeth on our podcast Taking the Supply Chain Pulse. And what did you learn with your study of podcasts and the research you did that you want to incorporate in what we do in the future?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, fred, you're a huge piece of the research, so we needed an engaging and interesting host, and that's you. I think you bring a lot of wisdom, knowledge, insights and a world of connections to the podcast that we would not be able to do without you. So, along with that, it was all about consistency and timing, and if you haven't been following along or you're new to this podcast, we have over 30 episodes in season one, and that is a testament to the dedication of you, fred. We weekly, every Thursday at 5 am, release a new episode, and we're going to continue to do that for season two. So for season two I'm excited about it we're definitely diving into a lot of the essential key topic areas that shape the future of healthcare, and just to name a few of those, we've got sterile processing episodes, supply chain pharmacy and the latest in robotics and technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there are a couple other things too for you folks out there that are only familiar with St Onge through this healthcare podcast. St Onge is a large industrial engineering company and the healthcare component only makes up 30% of the company's business. So we have a wide variety of folks that are working all around the world, including the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia. That is basically a 102-mile-long city that we're helping to design the infrastructure on that. So I'm hoping that we can bring some of our experts in from secondary sources that are working in non-healthcare to expose the healthcare folks to things that they might not hear but things that they might be able to incorporate in what they do. And that is really exciting about St Onge.
Speaker 1:As far as changes next year from this year, I think we have some topics out there that I recently asked our health care folks to give me some topics for next year to talk about, and one of the things that is interesting is new builds and projects, design projects. This year I think we're doing in America about $70 billion worth of healthcare construction, and in 2004, when I started researching this, going back to 2004, we were doing about $20 billion worth of construction in a year. Our infrastructure is getting older, our IDNs are getting bigger, their reach is getting further out into the community, so all of these things are topics and areas in which our listeners will be interested and will become involved, if they haven't already become involved, but they have no points of reference because this is largely new. So I'm looking forward to exploring that together. One of the things coming up that I've been trying to set up but it's been difficult because of the nature of the crisis itself was disaster planning in advance, so that when something like has happened recently in Asheville, so that when something like has happened recently in Asheville, north Carolina, where the Baxter plant got wiped out by the hurricane, we have a plan in place to mitigate that before it happens. I'm bringing in some IDN leaders to talk about what they've done, and also a company called Resolink, which is a crisis mitigation software as a service information provider that has some interesting perspective on those things. Also, I've got lined up the leader of Amazon's healthcare segment, which I think a lot of people would like to hear, because many people consider Amazon to be an up-and-coming competitor to what they do.
Speaker 1:So the more you can learn about what everyone else is doing, the better. Everything is going to be there too, so it's really exciting. But so a lot of good stuff in in year two and really I'd like to start reaching deep and finding getting the words of some of the people that work for a living in the supply chain. You know we have our folks out there going into, say, sterile processing. It would be nice to talk to some sterile processing techs and see what they what they see as problems they have to deal with. It'd be nice to talk to some sterile processing techs and see what they see as problems they have to deal with. It would be nice to be talking to some of the folks in warehouse and distribution to see how they deal with the prospect of robots coming in to help them do their work. All that type of stuff, I think, are interesting topics and when you're trying to do 52 episodes a year, you've got to find people that are new and different, with different perspectives, to talk to.
Speaker 2:So, fred, I certainly appreciate the energy and all the work that you and Lindsay have been doing to kind of drive the podcast forward Again. I think, like Fred said, we have a lot of exciting things coming. Certainly stay tuned and certainly always if you're interested in participating in the podcast or sharing perspective, you know certainly reach out to Fred and we'll keep you included in the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say either. We'd love to hear your comments and your suggestions. So my email address is fcrans. C-r-a-n-s. At stongecom, lindsay and Tom are lmcculloch at stongecom and Tom is treading at stongecom. We really would love to have this be your podcast as well as ours, so don't hesitate to send ideas and recommendations and, if you like that, I'd like to know what you think about the goatee, which you can't see. But we may be going. We may be going to video at some time. We've we've batted it around. If we went to video, I would have to dress up better for these things, but I think it's got its plus sign we do for season two, have fan mail on our podcast.
Speaker 3:So if you are following along, in addition to the emails that Fred shared, feel free to just click on our fan mail. We'll get a message and we're happy to either include you on the podcast, incorporate some of your ideas. So we definitely want to hear from you, you and we've made it really easy.
Speaker 1:If you, as a listener, want to be on the podcast, we would love to have you. You know we're we're open. We're open to anybody that wants to to to contribute, to contribute. So that's it. So, tom, thank you for your. You did a great job as the guest host. I think I was a lousy guest, but I try.
Speaker 2:Oh, come on, Fred, don't give yourself enough credit. Yeah, no, you did a great job, fred, and again, I can only be a fraction of what you are as a podcast host, so thanks again.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you everybody. We'll see you next time. On Taking the Supply Chain Pulse, take care.
