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Senthilkumar (Senthil) Thiyagarajan, PhD., is a supply chain analytics professional at Medline Industries, specializing in digital twins, supply chain optimization, and Industry 4.0 technologies. His research and publications span supply chain management, Lean Six Sigma, Quality, and digital transformation. A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Senthil actively serves in leadership roles within ASQ and IISE, contributing to content management and division-level initiatives.

Michelle:  We appreciate you writing an article recently for Quality about supply chain management. Could you tell us a little bit about the article and how you decided to write about this topic?

Senthil: If you look at the article, it's the combination of a couple of topics at least. First is building resilient supply chain through supplier management and quality affordability.

My background, as you mentioned, is as a supply chain professional. I'm interested in supply chain topics. That's where I did my Ph.D. using digital trend and supply chain resiliency.

I've been trying to do research in the area of supplier quality management and technologies like Industry 4.0 and the intersection between industry for auto and quality.

This topic is very relevant because we are facing a lot of geopolitical tensions across the world. And every company is trying to redesign the supply chain, onboard new suppliers, kind of doing everything in a compressed cycle. You look at the typical supplier onboarding. You go with supply searching and then initial testing qualification and then onboarding suppliers, you would have bigger leeway to make sure you have the good quality products coming out of suppliers.

But with all the changes happening, companies are pushed to compress the cycle and quickly onboard new suppliers, so that they can keep supplying products to customers, especially very critical healthcare supply chains.