In this episode of The Ethics Experts, Nick and Gio welcome J.S. Nelson. Nelson is an expert on corporate scandals, fraud and unethical behavior, and a law professor at Harvard Business School. Nelson’s new book, Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know, released on April 29th.
Welcome to a podcast series on the fight to secure Supply Chains, through cross-industry innovation. This series is sponsored by Exiger. In this series, we will explore the ongoing efforts of Exiger to lead the discussion and enhancement of Supply Chain Risk Management.
Over this series, I visit with Erika Peters, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Third Party & Supply Chain Risk Management; Tim Stone, Senior Director, Supply Chain Risk Management for Exiger Federal Solutions; Kim Lee, Director who focuses on risk and compliance; Nick Wildgoose, a Consultant at Exiger; Skyler Chi, Director and Deputy Head of Supply Chain and Third-Party Risk Management; Andrew Lehmann, Associate Director at Exiger; Jennifer Nestor, Vice President at Exiger, Americas and Public Sector; Theresa Campobasso, Senior Director for Defense Programs; Dan Banes President of Commercial Technology, and Mark Henderson, Director of Solution Design Lead.
In this episode 1, we discuss Supply Chain issues in the healthcare industry with Erika Peters and Tim Stone. Highlights of this podcast include:
Resources
Erika Peters Profile
Tim Stone Profile
Exiger Website
Exiger’s Supply Chain Explorer
Tom Fox welcomes Jules Oringel as his guest this week, and she may have the most unique story that’s ever been shared on The ESG Report. Jules is a second-year student at UNC where she double majors in Business Administration concentrating on ESG, Sustainability and Human Organizational Leadership & Development, with a minor in Public Policy. She’s here to talk about her passion for ESG and sustainability, and the road to pursuing it as a professional career post-grad.
Entering the World of Sustainable Development
Tom asks Jules what led to her studies at UNC. Jules explains that in 2018, after losing a loved one in the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, she founded Return Home Supplies, a youth-led nonprofit organization working towards ending gun violence in America. Speaking about gun safety legislation not only helped her heal from trauma, but also educated her on how policy and business were intermixed in a way she’d never understood before.
She was really introduced to ESG in college, and was so interested that she declared a major in business in addition to her focus in public policy. In Jules’ words, “Taking classes in ESG is just opening my eyes to what ESG in business and nonprofit can do to make the world a better place.”
The Impact of Customers on ESG
In her classes, Jules is learning about the economic benefits of working towards sustainable development goals as a business. Some notable benefits include higher sales, employee retention, and brand loyalty. She cites Patagonia as a worthy example for other businesses to follow. “We can’t go through and do hours of research on every single product we’re purchasing,” she comments. However, she continues, if we are mindful of the companies we purchase products from, we can make our own carbon footprints more sustainable. Ultimately, though, it’s up to corporations to focus on ESG to enact greater change.
Generation Z and ESG’s Future
The current generation is very willing to embrace many concepts pertaining to social justice. Tom asks Jules why she thinks that may be. “My generation is the most diverse, and the generation most focused on social and economic justice,” Jules claims. Generation Z strives to eventually work for organizations that care about their employees, their environmental impact, and forming long-standing partnerships with social organizations working to alleviate standing issues in our society.
However, she highlights the fact that without large companies listening to what Gen Z is looking for in terms of ESG, none of these problems will be solved. She hopes that as this generation continues to educate themselves and enters the work force, employers will begin to see the value of ESG.
Why Should ESG Internships Be Offered?
Jules speaks about the process of applying for internships. Tom asks her, “Do you have any thoughts that you could share directly to businesses about why they should offer ESG internships?” Though there are tons of marketing and finance internships available, it’s difficult to find roles in ESG despite the high levels of interest expressed by the current generation. Jules understands the requirement of 5 to 10 years of experience for most of the roles that are offered in social and environmental impact management, but encourages companies to work on providing more opportunities to learn from the best in sustainability, to ensure that they have convenient access to people who are ready and willing to tackle ESG issues.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals
There are 17 UN sustainable development goals ranging from zero hunger to decent work and economic growth. Each goal comes with specific targets to help meet them by the year 2030. The UN Global Compact hopes to provide different frameworks and resources to encourage businesses to embrace these goals. Should businesses cooperate, we have a chance to achieve a much more prosperous and equitable future, Jules points out.
RESOURCES
Tom Fox’s email
Jules Oringel | LinkedIn | Instagram | Return Home Supplies
UN Global Compact
In the Episode, I am joined by John Warren Vice President and General Counsel at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. We discuss the 2022 ACFE Report to the Nations, which is the most comprehensive report on the global scourge of fraud. It is a fascinating look of how fraud occurs, where is occurs and the steps you can take to prevent it.
Some of the highlights include:
You can download a copy of the ACFE 2022 Report to the Nations by clicking here.
Welcome to a blog post series on Exiger’s fight to secure supply chains, sponsored by Exiger LLC. In this series, we will explore the ongoing efforts of Exiger to lead the discussion and enhancement of Supply Chain Risk Management. In Episode 1, I visit with Erika Peters, a Senior Vice President (SVP) with close to two decades of experience working across the financial, corporate, and government industry, and focus on the firm’s supply chain and third-party risk management practices, and Tim Stone, Senior Director, Supply Chain Risk Management, for Exiger Federal Solutions. We discuss supply chain issues in the healthcare industry, including hospitals, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and medical services.
We began with critical supply chain risk management challenges in the healthcare industry. Peters said the “way I think about the healthcare sector and how it differentiates from the other sectors is that the ultimate risk is trying to mitigate fatalities. This means thinking about the third parties that healthcare companies must work with and then their supply chain makes it one of the most extremely critical industries to be thinking about. In the current post-pandemic era, it is one of the timeliest topics. Equally important is that if you must switch out a key vendor, the entire process can take between 12-18 months, putting your organization in a bind. This means you need to put a rigorous process in place and then follow that process.”
Stone noted key lessons learned on healthcare industry supply chain issues from the pandemic. He stated that the federal government created a Joint Acquisition Task Force in the Department of Defense (DoD) during the pandemic. This was an interagency push to source products across various pandemic-related areas like therapies, vaccines, ingredients, testing, materials and equipment, personal equipment, and even items such as no-touch thermometers. The task force illuminated dozens of product areas across those different sectors, then used market intelligence tools to identify companies in each industry. Further, they used modeling to estimate production capacity and entered information into the Exiger software product DDIQ to risk-rank based upon these and other inputs.
This led to the finding of supply chain fragility. This is because many components in the healthcare supply chain come from state-owned enterprises, and many of these are from China. Even when the team began to focus on migrating to India, it turned out that many underlying components came from China. Another problem discovered was the concentration of raw goods and manufacturers. Stone noted, “we saw otherwise obscure examples of concentration risks arise during COVID that you had never thought about before. In Malaysia, for example, we realized it was a top producer of nitro gloves that owns about 65% of the market. This led to COVID-driven disruptions, which impacted our ability to get nitro gloves. This was the way the world turned and focused on supply chains and where goods are ultimately sourced.” Just-in-time supply chains saw similar if not more disruptions as well.
We then turned to how the healthcare industry supply chain can improve its approach to managing risk. Here Peters noted there were two key areas. The first is programmatic, and the second involves a technological solution. Companies need to create a genuinely risk-based program, for instance, looking at entities that will cause an operating room to shut down or prohibit a company from getting materials required for medicines. These critical entities need to have the most in-depth due diligence; taking that strategic risk appetite and having it trickled down to the tactical level is an important way of making sure that the people at the bottom who are doing the actual work that they are hitting the right risk lens that the company wants to take.
The other piece is to have technology in place to facilitate this and that “we need to improve on that technology.” She noted, “we get to this higher level of more of a predictive posture, which is the golden standard where we need to be. We need to have these teams looking at their risk and bringing it into one view of this entity, especially these critical ones.” It looks at a wide variety of risks, from legal/regulatory to geopolitical to operational. It is doing so quickly and efficiently so the front-line supply chain professionals can make decisions for their organizations’ long-term care and health.
Stone concluded that down the road, supply chain professionals in the healthcare sector “can improve the bottom line, through greater fluidity, greater understanding of their supply chains, greater ability to on the fly to gauge the credibility of vendors, and have that due diligence information at their fingertips through technology.” It will also help avoid a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse and create a more well-oiled machine from a supply chain perspective.
Join us tomorrow when we spotlight the manufacturing and consumer markets.
Resources
Erika Peters Profile
Tim Stone Profile
Exiger Website
Exiger’s Supply Chain Explorer
