Supply chain & inventory specialist Matthew Guy Gallardo

<p>Matthew Guy Gallardo, Global Spare Parts Planner at CooperSurgical discusses his career, importance of field service and his music with Caroline Gregory of The Field Engineer.How do you overlap with field service?So at the core you could say my job is to make sure that when a field engineer anywhere in the world needs a component to service a medical device that part has to be available and for it to be available it has to be correctly forecasted and hopefully sitting in the right regional warehouse.Concretely, I would say that leads into inventory, you know, optimization, you know, safety stock modelling, all of these specific supply chain aspects. And then hopefully with that, you&#39;re able to reduce stockouts and all of this work involves connecting different data systems, right, that we have in the company, CRM, ERP, Power BI, you know, this ecosystem which can actually tell us the sort of consumption we have.Data and AIBut data accuracy is something which is constantly we&#39;re constantly working on it especially now moving into the whole how can we you know integrate AI into anything or everything. I think it&#39;s so important that we first of all see what we can use beforehand in terms of tools or whether we can use just the most basic mathematical formulas to you know make decisions before going into AI. I think AI requires some clear cut data. Data which has no garbage or no rubbish on it, right?The customer and satisfactionI think the most satisfying part of the role and I think this is across the board from you know the planning side the operational the schedulers the field service engineers is seeing that we&#39;ve been able to deliver for the customer and I know that sounds very corporate but that&#39;s the reality especially in our industry and in many industries right. Being able to see that a shortage we thought we were going to have on site all of a sudden we were able to meet. Seeing that a customer still trusts us from one year to the end to carry out a service on an equipment which is very valuable for them. I think it&#39;s worth it. I think it sort of pushes you to not stick to your scope of work but actually look into external factors and making sure that we can really meet everybody&#39;s expectations even though that&#39;s very difficult at times.Lack of the right spare partsAnd then seeing the impact that has on the field service engineer because that could potentially delay their visit or create a revisit. Value of an MBAThe MBA allows if it&#39;s like a good program which I was fortunate enough to go on, it allows you to actually sharpen up on how you think and possibly how leadership might be thinking in your company especially if you&#39;re working in a big company because that sometimes is very difficult to translate down and how you can then you know build with vendor relationships globally.MusicObviously languages come into communication and so on which also moves us I think onto music because that&#39;s another way of communicating.Overlap between managing global supply chain and being a drop in musicianI&#39;m a drop in musician, so I tend to go to jam sessions a lot and open mics. I&#39;m classically trained, but you know, to get away from work, I tend to go to a lot of local pubs and you know, local stages to just drop in and play. So, you&#39;ll have various musicians playing and then when someone drops out, you drop in, right? And then you start improvising on the go. And it&#39;s when I&#39;m on stage, I tend to always listen in to all the parties what they&#39;re doing because harmonically you need to listen in. You can&#39;t just start playing because it won&#39;t sound very nice and then you&#39;ll know if it sounds nice or not because you&#39;ll see the more people come in or more people go. But and that&#39;s quite similar to my role because in my role you need to take into account so many different factors. So I think those two are like in a certain way in parallel.</p>