Working on a supply chain team requires constant problem-solving, collaboration and adaptability.
Gabby Albino, director of inventory systems and logistics, described working in the supply chain at direct-to-patient healthcare company Ro as “dynamic.”
“What makes the work particularly interesting is the scale and pace of change,” Albino said. “We’re not managing a traditional supply chain where demand or operating conditions are relatively static. Patient demand can grow quickly, new medications are being introduced and our fulfillment network continues to evolve alongside the business.”
Jake Burger, supply chain mission operations lead at Allen Control Systems, a drone warfare defense technology company, sees working in supply chains as a complex combination of understanding and communication.
“You have to digest complex engineering requirements and communicate that to suppliers, while interfacing with manufacturing, finance and complex processes,” Burger said.
Built In spoke with Albino and Burger to learn more about what it takes for supply chain professionals to keep complex systems moving smoothly through a changing market.
Ro is a direct-to-patient healthcare company with a mission of helping patients manage their care journey.
What’s it like to work on the supply chain or procurement team at your company?
Working in supply chain at Ro is incredibly dynamic because we sit at the intersection of patient care, pharmacy operations, technology and logistics. We’re responsible for making sure our pharmacies have medications and supplies available and that we can reliably get those medications to patients when they need them.
What makes the work particularly interesting is the scale and pace of change. We’re not managing a traditional supply chain where demand or operating conditions are relatively static. Patient demand can grow quickly, new medications are being introduced and our fulfillment network continues to evolve alongside the business. That means we’re always balancing access and reliability with inventory, operational efficiency and cost.
There’s also a significant technology component to the work. My team manages many of the systems and processes that connect planning, inventory, pharmacy operations and logistics. We’re constantly looking at how we can use better data, systems and automation to make the supply chain more scalable while ultimately creating a more reliable experience for patients.
How does your team help the company stay resilient through change or growth?
Cold-chain growth is a great example of how our team evolved alongside the business. As our GLP-1 medication fulfillment volume has grown, shipping has become significantly more complex. These medications are temperature-sensitive, so we’re not just trying to get a package from point A to point B — we need to make sure it gets there within the appropriate timeframe and temperature range.
A big part of building resiliency is moving away from manual, one-size-fits-all processes and toward more data-driven decision making. For example, we’re working on ways to use carrier transit-time data to make smarter shipping decisions based on where a patient lives and the stability requirements of their medication.
That kind of work allows us to absorb significant growth without adding proportional cost or operational complexity. It also gives us more flexibility to respond when something changes — whether that’s patient demand, weather, carrier performance or capacity within our pharmacy network.
What should candidates know about the planning, partnerships or problem-solving involved in this work?
One thing candidates should know is how cross-functional supply chain problem-solving is. Very few challenges can be solved by supply chain alone. We regularly partner with pharmacy, product, engineering, finance, quality and external suppliers and carriers to design solutions that work operationally, technically, financially and for the patient.
When demand for GLP-1 medications increased rapidly, it put pressure on inventory processes and systems built when the business was much smaller. We worked across the supply chain and our systems teams to stabilize processes, improve monitoring and give planning and purchasing teams the information they needed to make time-sensitive decisions.
At the same time, we focused on the root cause, creating tighter integrations between pharmacy systems, inventory systems and planning tools. That’s representative of the problem-solving culture at Ro; solve the immediate challenge while building a solution that can support the next stage of growth.
Allen Control Systems is a drone warfare defense technology company developing counter-drone robotic gun systems targeted at neutralizing attacking drone swarms.
What’s it like to work on the supply chain or procurement team at your company?
It’s complex and involves heavy understanding across industries and communicating across stakeholders. You have to digest complex engineering requirements and communicate that to suppliers, while interfacing with manufacturing, finance and complex processes. Much of the systems are at an early stage and require handling rapid changes across engineering and manufacturing, while also building resilient supply chain foundations that will scale as the company grows.
How does your team help the company stay resilient through change or growth?
On the “mission ops supply chain,” it’s an obsession with the customer. That customer is both internal, mission operations personal interfacing directly with the customer, and external, the customer that will receive the final packaged product. This means paying attention to high levels of detail, communicating rapidly about arising issues across multiple functional teams and staying on top of an ever-changing and complex supply chain landscape. There is no one size fits all, it’s about identifying holes in processes and implementing new ones, as well as understanding the broad initiatives across the company to create resilient supplier networks, strong enterprise resource planning integration and hands-on packaging solutions that deliver a working product.
What should candidates know about the planning, partnerships or problem-solving involved in this work?
Planning requires developing systems that can scale beyond the current company form. It requires solutions that solve both the immediate problem and provide resiliency and scalability as the company grows. It requires not siloing understanding, but building it across the company so anyone can jump in and work with the systems on hand. Problems develop daily and require quick thinking and a resilient mindset, as well as the courage to execute without any hand holding and micromanagement. This work is complex, evolving and fun. The problems solved here save lives and keep the company marching forward.
