Mr Ross Darrah has two decades of industry experience and a solid imprint on the Supply Chain and Procurement worlds of New Zealand. With experience across business sectors in agriculture, infrastructure, education, finance, utilities, not-for-profit, local and central government, retail and manufacturing, Mr Darrah has acquired in-depth knowledge in the art of opportunity identification, simplification, standardisation, efficiency and cost savings in both supply chain and procurement.

Following the successful founding of ‘Management Toolbox’ in 1999 – an innovative company that helps businesses sharpen their strategy for growth and efficiency – and its eventual sale in 2011, Ross went on to lead business transformation for the New Zealand firm of multi-national accounting (professional services) giant Grant Thornton, focusing on strategic procurement and productivity improvement.

In 2014 Mr Darrah joined healthAlliance – one of the New Zealand’s most significant shared service providers for the health sector in finance, procurement, supply chain, and information services.

He spent 19 months as the General Manager of Procurement where he led the transition from a regional service with four customers and one location to a national service, with 20 customers and seven locations, before accepting his current role as Chief Executive Officer in December 2015.

Synopsis - Supply Chain Risk Management
With the health sector facing the growing issue of deceasing funds and an increased demand in delivering quality services to a growing and aging population, healthAlliance combined the purchasing power of the health sector and extended their service from 4 to 20 DHBs with an annual spend in excess of $1b per annum over the last 18 months.

This change of scale and pace is unprecedented within the public sector, and in the process, has created significant value with the benefit of reinvesting into patient care.

The success of this transformation was not done without clear objectives and risk management strategy along the way. Key elements included, but are not limited to, collaboration with DHBs to streamline business processes, combining buying power by applying the Total Cost of Ownership principles and standardising of requirements across multiple DHBs. With continued innovation and sustained collaboration, the health sector will continue to benefit by easing the mounting financial pressure that is currently present.

Synopsis - Supply Chain Shared Services - The HealthAlliance Story
Critical success factors, implementation woes – how has the journey been for Health Alliance and how do you gain stakeholders support.

In a recent activity Supply Chain was asked to create a ‘Rich Picture’ of the environment in which they worked, complete with environmental influences, obstacles, and established service locations. The idea of a ‘Rich Picture’ for gathering information about our complex environment enabled visual brainstorming at the pre-analysis stage. However, we feel our picture gave a true impression of the landscape in which we work.

It was no surprise to have the board game ‘Snakes and Ladders’ presented as the perfect mechanism for illustrating our picture. Whether you consider the number of ladders (good & or skill) vs the higher number of snakes (bad & or luck) to be a fair interpretation or not is up to the viewer. A recent review of the Successes and Opportunities for Improvement  (OFIs) with our senior leadership team supplied us with the most up to date analysis of key themes and the rest will speak for itself. We make the most of the ladders and skills we have!