OneBlood and COVID-19: Building An Agile Supply Chain Epilogue

OneBlood Goes Agile

Now that you have written a memo as Martin Grable advocating that OneBlood and the U.S. blood industry as a whole incorporate an agile strategy in response to COVID-19, let's explore what Grable and OneBlood actually did, both before and after the outbreak of this pandemic.

First, OneBlood did in fact adopt an agile approach, and fortunately for many people in its service area, it did so long before the spread of COVID-19. By early 2020, Grable and OneBlood found themselves reflecting on a trying period of several yearsboth internally and across the industrybut, after fully embracing the agile concept, OneBlood was seeing the results it had hoped for. While there was still work to be done, OneBlood was proud of how far it had come. Below, we take a brief glance at OneBlood's key moves through the lens of the three core competencies required for agile success. By investing in an agile supply chain, OneBlood was better prepared to respond to an unforeseen catastrophic event: COVID-19.

Management Competence

The call for taking OneBlood agile was met with resounding support from OneBlood's leadership team. Management agreed to invest in the proposed organizational changes, especially around data science and building a culture of data-based decision-making. The team recognized how competent and effective their employees already were. To ensure that it retained its talented team, OneBlood adopted a $15/hour minimum wage. As part of this change, hourly employees that had been making more than minimum wage received a commensurate raise as well.

IT Competence

OneBlood made significant investments in IT infrastructure. The organization built and deployed its own internally architected Blood Establishment Computer System (BECS) and an Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) platform to support a wide range of use cases. The IT team had several rounds of strategy meetings focused on future needs and implementation, with strong support from management. OneBlood also built the infrastructure for a data science team. It invested in a technology stack with high connectivity and compatibility, implementing multiple tools that could be used for building machine learning models, forecasting, prototyping, automation, and more.

Operational Competence

OneBlood created a new data science function to leverage the EBI platform, centralizing and standardizing efforts that individual departments had previously done independently of one another. The data science function also laid the foundation for more advanced techniques to be used in the future. Senior leadership supported the vision, with OneBlood's chief operating officer acting as the executive champion for the data science team, building excitement within the organization while also setting expectations that failures were to be expected (given that this had never been done in the blood industry before).

The data science team focused on building relationships with other departments and leveraging their industry expertise. The approach they took was to determine how data science could fit the business modelnot how the business should fundamentally change because of data science. Led by data scientist Kelley Counts, the data science team worked with individual departments to identify areas of opportunity and to continue educating them on what data science could do. The data science team was remarkably successful at building credibility and trust within the organization, developing propensity models for donations that allowed other teams to understand who might become a recurring donor. Martin Grablenow sees data science as one of the biggest potential wins of his organization's agile efforts. Other elements of the agile approach continue to evolve. Long-term tasks such as breaking down silos to increase organizational understanding remain in process. In general, the OneBlood team is proud of how far the organization has come and how much better positioned it is for the future.

Timeline: OneBlood's Agile Response to COVID-19

In March of 2020, OneBlood announced that it would begin collecting plasma from individuals who recovered from the coronavirus in hopes that the plasma could be transfused to people with lifethreatening coronavirus infections. Shortly thereafter; Miami, Florida Mayor Francis Suarez, an early coronavirus recoveree, donated with OneBlood and became Florida's first COVID-19 convalescent plasma donor. Soon, many more coronavirus recoverees began stepping forward to donate.

Meanwhile, OneBlood swiftly implemented a policy in which it tested all blood donations for the coronavirus antibody. Not only did such testing provide valuable information to public health officials, but it also served to increase the available supply of potential COVID-19 convalescent plasma donors.

As COVID-19 carried into 2021, OneBlood issued repeated calls for convalescent plasma donors via the media and its website, keeping the latter up-to-date with the latest vaccine and blood donation guidelines from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Conclusion: The Value of Agile Supply Chains

While no one was fully prepared for the event of a pandemic, implementing an agile approach enabled OneBlood to better respond to the unforeseen circumstances of the coronavirus than it might have just a few years earlier. OneBlood's willingness to engage in data science is just one way its supply chain has become more agile. The results of OneBlood's implementation of the agile methodology could hardly be more dramatic: by facilitating a more accurate and wide-reaching picture of supply and demand for blood, as well as flexible processes to deliver said blood to where it is most needed as efficiently as possible, many lives have been saved that might otherwise have been lost. As this case study has demonstrated, agile supply chains offer significant value, especially when there is a need to respond to the unexpected. While the agile approach may not be the right fit for all organizations or situations, if deployed properly and in the correct context, its impact can be transformative.

From the above, with human knowledge explain the concept of agile management.