Cork Medical Realigns Growth Strategy After Promoting Sean McGinley to Director of Supply Chain and Operations

As Cork Medical continues to offer innovative wound care solutions, the demand for our products has greatly increased. Due to this increase in demand, we needed to realign our manufacturing and production teams to accommodate.

“Cork Medical’s growth mindset and ambition requires solid fundamentals, aligned processes, and strong leadership,” said Cork Medical President Mike Cates. “For us to support these growth pursuits, we needed to strengthen our fulfillment capabilities.” 

Sean McGinley, who began his career with Cork Medical 15 years ago, was recently promoted to director of supply chain and operations to help strengthen these fulfillment capabilities. Prior to Sean’s promotion, he served as the director of operations managing the day-to-day responsibilities of satellite offices as well as three corporate teams: insurance, billing, and service.

A little over three years ago, Cork Medical shifted its focus from direct product sales to manufacturing and distributing products. This shift created more responsibilities for Sean as he was now tasked with managing relationships with dealers. He would oversee all dealer billing needs, service and repair requests, and collections notices.

After Sean took on these responsibilities, we decided to expand our warehouse space and launch a new wound care product, Versa. This created a need for supply chain management so as not to create bottlenecks in inventory needs. Seeing how Sean successfully managed Cork Medical’s operations and the operations of its customers, he became the obvious choice to take on supply chain management.

“Over the past several years, Sean has done an excellent job building out our fulfillment and customer service teams,” continued Cates. “He has focused on creating processes and putting the right players in the right positions to implement these processes. We are already realizing improvements in our metrics and are seeing more streamlined alignments amongst managers’ and employees’ standard work.”

Working more closely with the purchasing and warehousing team, Sean focuses on creating and documenting processes that help balance inventory to limit product waste and/or shortages. This process consists of creating two types of inventories, raw goods and finished goods. Given that Cork Medical’s sales process can take more than six months to complete, the production team needs to be able to anticipate what goods are needed well in advance to maintain supply and demand.

Sean has only been in his new role a few months, but he has already created better warehouse efficiencies. He’s implemented a process where raw goods and finished goods will always be stocked for up to one month to accommodate any unplanned product needs. He’s also been working with the production team to gear up for the new Versa launch. With the help of his new purchasing manager Bradley Stephenson, Sean has been able to stock an inventory of raw and finished goods to last up to five months of order requests.

“Sean's ability to build and galvanize teams was clear to me early on and I am enthusiastic about his promotion to take on supply chain management,” concluded Cates.