Jérôme Lesenechal

LivaNova is a global medical technology company built on decades of experience and a strong commitment to their patients. Their focus is on transforming lives with products and therapies for the head and heart, operating in Cardiopulmonary, Neuromodulation and Advanced Circulatory Support technologies.

For LivaNova, it’s health innovation that truly matters. 

Their diverse product portfolio and pipeline include the following therapeutic areas:

• Advanced Circulatory Support
• Cardiopulmonary
• Difficult-to-Treat Depression
• Drug-Resistant Epilepsy
• Heart Failure
• Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Their Chief Procurement Officer (CPO), Jérôme Lesenechal, has spent his entire career in Procurement, coming from 17 years’ experience in automotive, through multiple categories, before joining LivaNova in February 2018.

Lesenechal leads the global Procurement team in charge of strategic Sourcing activities, both for indirect services and for direct material as well as new product development.

“This means our responsibilities go from clinical studies to spare parts management, through to serial production and corporate services,” he says. 

The relationship between a MedTech company like LivaNova and their suppliers is, of course, crucial. The quality of those relationships will in the end determine patient outcomes.

“Suppliers share our values,” says Lesenechal, “especially our purpose to improve the lives of patients (which speaks to one of our core values, ‘patients first’).

“I consider myself as accountable for the healthcare supply chain, and our suppliers are doing so too.”

Supplier relationship management, in MedTech and beyond, has grown more important than ever before. Contract obligations or Purchase Price Management are not enough to manage ongoing supply chain disruptions anymore, and this is not only about the power dynamic between the company and its suppliers. 

"There is an urgent need to extend the company's borders to external partners,” Lesenechal says, “because together, we are stronger and more creative to be able to anticipate and to fix problems.

“The CPO especially needs to orchestrate brainstorming sessions with suppliers: this can be to get support for a difficult-to-source component, or to drive a game-changer design evolution, or to influence business decisions.”

Lesenechal expresses that, on several occasions over the last few years, he has seen that the value coming from that type of co-working is very high, compared to a standard purchase price discussion.

Regarding internal stakeholders, he believes that procurement must play a strong role in Product Lifecycle Management.

From supplier selection in a new product design phase to the phase-out of another one through the proactive management of the obsolescence risk, Lesenechal maintains that procurement’s partnership with R&D and marketing can have a massive impact on sourcing agility, as well as profitability per product – and that this is what procurement must drive.

Developing second sources, having a dynamic process of redesign for electronics and revisiting specifications to make them easier to source, are key.

“What we call Sustaining R&D must now be fully integrated into procurement’s strategy, as well as to the daily management of supply issues,” he says. 

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