Senior Manager
Memorial Blood Center’s
Duluth, MN
05.1997 - Current
- Manage and direct daily operations/activities of the Duluth Component Lab, Hospital Services, and Facilities departments
- Managed a 24/7/365 ‘Essential Worker’ department through Covid without ever needing to close the department. Focused on the impact of the team's work to the healthcare community
- Coach, mentor, and recognize staff to promote organizational values (Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, and Synergy)
- Perform basic departmental tasks to help team when need arises
- Evaluate hiring, firing and promotions requests
- Utilize financial and quantitative information to manage cost, staffing, and department needs
- Develop and implement corrective and preventative actions resulting from errors and audit findings
- Experienced with Teams and virtual meetings
- Represent entire Northland region as a key member of the Division's Operations Leadership team
- Advocate for the needs of the Northland site to ensure efficient, quality, and well maintained operations
- Manage relationships with 20 hospitals and 3 medical transport facilities, ensuring that their blood supply needs were met
- Successfully onboarded new medical transport companies as well as several new hospitals
- Plan and host on-going education for the hospital laboratory staff with bi-annual all day Technical Advisory Meetings
- Collaborated with vendors, suppliers and transport carriers, worked with hospitals to meet needs at lowest price point possible
- Provide excellent customer service to external and internal customers
- Managed large-scale projects and introduced new systems, tools, and processes to achieve challenging objectives.
- Led teams focused on several large computer projects. Created sub teams to keep projects on track.
- Identified plans and resources required to meet project goals and objectives.
- Divisional Project Lead and Core Team Member for a new Timekeeping system (Kronos Work Force Dimensions)
- Worked closely with the other core project team members across all divisions
- Provided project team members support, encouragement, recognition, appreciation, and kept the team on track for a successful and on time go live
- Dived into the project with the team for software set-up, preliminary testing, software changes, IQ, OQ, and PQ Validation Testing
- Developed and presented training materials
- Upon go-live, provided on-going support, resolved problems, answered questions, and worked with multiple divisions to ensure a smooth transition
- Operations Steering Team member for a new Blood Establishment Computer system for the entire organization
- Kept team motivated and moving forward with project, utilized SharePoint for communication, worked through timeline/workload concerns
- Built tables and processes in the computer system as well as Visio flow diagrams to ensure processes worked and team members all agreed on the flow of the work
- Subject Matter Expert for main computer system (ElDorado Donor)
- Project lead for a major organizational project, to implement new Hospital Ordering Portal web based computer system, within the Minnesota Division and later the Nebraska division
- Subject Matter Expert for the Hospital Online Ordering portal, determine impact and needs around mandated quarterly upgrades
- Led emergency need projects to ensure continued operations
- Project Lead for new equipment, new systems, and new processes, examples: change to 100 % leukoreduction, change in blood bag manufacturers, change to 24/7/365 operations, new filters, major remodeling project, new walk- in refrigerator
- Perform Post Implementation Review after completion of every project for lessons learned, completion of project goals, timeline, and cost
- Attended project management training classes
