By Douglass D. Phillips, MBA
NPO distinguishes itself by taking a scientific, data-based approach to business.
Charles Redding, President and CEO of MedShare International, a non-profit organization based in Atlanta, GA, never envisioned himself running a non-profit, period. After graduating from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, he started his career as a Developing Engineer for Goodyear. He worked there approximately 4 years, before joining Johnson and Johnson as a Process Engineer. During his 23 year tenure at Johnson and Johnson, Charles grew exponentially due to his insatiable hunger for self-improvement and the organization’s dedication to professional development. Before leaving the company, he worked in many different capacities, the last of which was as the Vice President of Global Operations. In this position, he was required to travel and live all over the world. Eventually, what was almost imperceptible at first, became an increasingly intense desire to return home, back to Atlanta. Consequently, he returned to his roots and took the position of COO at MedShare International, an Atlanta-based, non-profit organization in the medical device industry that shared his passion for caring about people. In a relatively short amount of time, two years, Charles was promoted to the position of CEO.
What is MedShare International?
As Charles eloquently stated, “MedShare is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the environment and healthcare industry through the efficient recovery and redistribution of surplus medical supplies and medical equipment to underserved medical and healthcare facilities around the world.” In real terms, MedShare takes the tremendous amounts of waste that hospitals produce such as non-expired, unused, unopened medical supplies that would normally go to landfills and redistributes these supplies to needy, impoverished recipients in countries around the world. MedShare operates by World Health Organization standards – “If we can’t use it here (United States), we are not going to ship it there.” It will not ship expired products. If equipment/supplies are not approved in the U.S., MedShare has no use for it. Critics say, “How can MedShare afford to operate by this standard?” Charles responds, “When dealing with people’s lives, how can we afford not to? We can’t take those kinds of chances.”
MedShare does not recover and/or redistribute any pharmasecuticals or medications only supplies and equipment. All equipment is refurbished, checked for proper functionality and supplied with transformers to ensure that proper power requirements are being adhered to.
MedShare was founded in 1998 and has since served 97 of the 200 countries around the world. The organization has shipped more than 1,100 40 foot containers of product around the world. Each container contains roughly 1,000 boxes of medical supplies and 30 to 40 pieces of bio-medical equipment.
MedShare is fueled by volunteering.
One may ask, “With only three locations in the United States: Atlanta, GA, Secaucus NJ, and a large facility in the San Francisco Bay area, how can MedShare regularly meet the needs of nations all over the world? This question is compounded it becomes known that its flagship facility in Atlanta only houses 40 employees. The answer lies in MedShare’s extensive network of volunteers; it has over 18,000 volunteers. These volunteers collect over 2 million pounds of supplies and equipment coming from hospitals, distributors and manufacturers.
In addition to volunteers, MedShare has partners in every country that it serves who assist with custom clearance for the containers and delivery to sites (hospitals).
MedShare has a scientific, data-based approach to business.
Asking tough questions facilitated change.
When Charles took over as CEO, he felt the need to change something. Initially, he focused on output – the number of shipments, medical mission teams, etc. As time progressed, he became more focused on the question of impact. “What impact is MedShare having on the people using its products?” When he asked himself this question, it prompted other questions such as: “Are we teaching people how to fish or are we feeding them fish?” “Are we creating a huge dependency on what we do to the point where people are not improving?” “Does one container really make an impact or not?” “How do you evaluate the thousands of gloves and bandages sent to a hospital and now translate that to the impact tangible impact?”
To answer these questions, he will launch a 5-year study that will focus on two countries.
Again, why the 5 year study? MedShare wants to understand what the health problems and health priorities of the recipient countries it services are and not simply talk about container shipments. Ultimately, it wants to have child health care programs, infectious disease programs and primary care programs in these recipient countries. If this is to come about, it must have an extensive set of data collected over years.
MedShare underwent a detailed analysis to decide which two countries out of the 82 recipient countries it served between 2006 and 2013 it would select. Charles designed a selection priority matrix by which the 82 countries would be filtered through to arrive at the two countries used for the study. Some of the filters in the matrix included: health needs assessments, security risks, strategic fit, existing relationships, ease of entry, corruption index, etc. Each filter was weighted from 10 to 1 and then ranked high, medium and low. Subsequently, after multiplying the weight with the ranking, a priority number is produced. After another group of filters was created during a board meeting – ease of fundraising and government level partnerships – the two countries were chosen. Liberia and Nicaragua were selected.
How did MedShare increase its capacity?
One of MedShare’s goals was to ship out 150 containers per year. Charles quickly realized the fallacy in this goal. The company never had 150 projects to do, so how could they get 150 projects out? How does an organization come to understand what it can and cannot do? This is an issue of capacity. He began plotting data to see how many shipments they were getting out per month. The average was around 7 per month. Charles matter-of-factly stated, “If you want the process to be predictable, you’ve got to increase the mean and reduce the variation. Over 8 years of charting data, they only did 89 shipments, but told me that they would do 150. Big gap.” Over the next few years they increased their shipments to roughly 9 per month, which was less than 110 per year.
Ultimately, Charles designed a Pareto Chart to understand how the projects were coming. Each project had different cycle times. He came up with a formula to determine how many projects MedShare would have to secure to get a certain number of containers out. After running the data it was determined that MedShare gets out 85% of what it put in within a time/budget period. The question then became, “How can we increase the 85% to 98%?” To increase capacity, problems were defined, baseline metrics were taken, and creative solutions were employed. After the data was sufficiently mined, Charles did a linear regression to predict how many shipments MedShare could do per year. In 2014, he predicted MedShare would ship 127 containers and they shipped 124, not 150.
Data-based approaches to business continued to benefit MedShare.
To really grasp the concept of cause and effect as it relates to the world of non-profits, Charles created a fishbone diagram to list all the intricacies of the shipping process. It turned out to be more detailed than anyone had realized. Every area was evaluated and in doing so the slope began to shift.
Under Charles’ leadership, MedShare considers what its highest risks are and has a plan in place for it. He employs an easy-read dash board that helps him to make sure that everything stays on track; it prevents reoccurring problems from bogging down efforts. He maps everything out, figures out how long each process should take and what the end state of each process should look like. Sound data-base approaches to business certainly help to manage the complexities in business foreign and domestic.
Information taken solely from: “Managing the Complexities of an International Non-Profit”
Presented by: Charles Redding, President and CEO of MedShare International
PMI Atlanta Dinner Meeting
5/11/15