PEOPLE
In Good Hands Mark Zacur, healthcare industry executive, reflects on an unprecedented time to be in the healthcare supply chain. To say that the last two and a half years have been chaotic for the med/surg industry would be an understatement.
At the beginning of 2022, Mark Zacur announced his retirement from Owens & Minor as executive vice president and chief commercial officer. Zacur said it’s been a “crazy, but immensely satisfying two-and-a-half-year run, as teammates came together and transformed the company … to a dynamic industry leader.”
Zacur oversaw the commercial operations of the company – which came front and center during the pandemic. Prior to Owens & Minor, Zacur worked for Thermo Fisher Scientific in several roles, including vice president and general manager of Fisher Healthcare. He spoke with Repertoire about Owens & Minor’s pandemic response, how the supply chain has changed in such a short period of time, and what skills distributor reps will need to be successful with today’s clients. Repertoire: Commercially, did the pandemic accelerate what Owens & Minor was able to accomplish because of the collaboration and changes happening? Mark Zacur: Owens & Minor was well positioned pre-pandemic. For starters, Owens & Minor has an established America’s based PPE manufacturing footprint with raw materials being manufactured in North Carolina and the products finished in either the Americas or the United States. This gave Owens & Minor an advantage as our PPE manufacturing and supply chains were not impacted by the shutdowns overseas that were happening during the most intense periods of the pandemic. Also prior to the pandemic, Owens & Minor made the decision 46
March 2022
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to expand raw material production, a decision that allowed us to expand finished goods manufacturing much faster than would typically happen. The O&M team pre-pandemic certainly had things going in the right direction. When the pandemic hit, all of a sudden the sale of domesticmanufactured product was in demand and O&M was able to respond to the industry’s need.
Mark Zacur
Repertoire: How do you think the pandemic has changed the supply chain permanently, both for Owens & Minor and distributors overall? Zacur: There are several things. Certainly, transparency is much more important than it’s ever been. Transparency
from the perspective of all involved parties – manufacturers, distributors and providers. From the provider perspective – what are their demand signals? Obviously, in a pandemic, it’s dramatically different. But even in normal circumstances, provider demand signals are key. Are they going to have a demand increase because they’re bringing on a new practice or there’s a new initiative around certain procedures, that sort of thing. In the pandemic, all parties worked together to optimize PPE supply. Using real-time data helped to identify when there was a product shortage and where to allocate a product, so we could send PPE into hotspots while maintaining continuity of supply in regions that weren’t seeing dramatic spikes. Similarly, when there’s supply disruption from the manufacturer, the distributor and the manufacturer have to be very open about it and communicate the status proactively to the providers. Moving forward, this timely and transparent three-way communication is really critical. I see this with the global supply chain challenges the industry continues to deal with today. Since this is an industry-wide problem and everybody’s in the same boat, the transparency has gotten better. The test will come when as an industry we
