Mission-Driven Professionals And Students Build America's Supply Chains
By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma
Tales of purpose-led professional careers that bring innovations to business leaders and opportunities to university students.
They inspire us.
Like that of Paul Lavoie, whose title is narrative in itself:
Vice President, Innovation, Corporate Partnerships & Career Success and Chair, Corporate Partnership Council, President’s Office, University of New Haven.
At UNH a major objective is to bolster supply chains in Connecticut -and throughout the U.S. - by plugging UNH students into those manufacturing networks.
He does this via the university’s Elevation Center, and its newest addition, a branch of the CONNEX Marketplace.
The partnership that has grown between Lavoie and Davis is a tale of overcoming challenges faced by manufacturers in the U.S., and supplying new leaders to bolster our domestic supply chains.
Roles All Rolled Up
While in the private sector, Lavoie was concerned about challenges facing manufacturers in the U.S. Someday he hoped to play a part in overcoming some of them.
Then while he was working for the state of Connecticut as Chief Manufacturing Officer, he says, “a colleague from my days as general manager at Carey Manufacturing emailed”:
Paul, we found our solution. What we've been looking for.
That “solution” was embodied in Davis and manifest in CONNEX Marketplace, a digital platform connecting U.S. manufacturers, buyers, and suppliers across the entire domestic supply chain.
All industries. All suppliers. All Manufacturers.
We are accustomed to search technology that is exclusive to helping drug sponsors find CDMOs. But this all-inclusive approach can make sense for us.
As our drug industry adds modalities; our technologies dovetail with those in other industries; we rely on advanced manufacturing equipment and instrumentation; and we require a widening array of materials … an all-industry inclusive supplier-search platform may be of great utility.
Already, Davis tells me, companies such as Abbvie, Bausch, Medtronic, Merck, and Zylo Therapeutics utilize CONNEX.
Back to Lavoie, at his state job he had been tasked with “finding solutions to assist the manufacturing sector, develop and support initiatives like onshoring, reshoring, local shoring, supply-chain resiliency; to build out supply-chain companies, reducing expenses … all of those things.”
He worked to get Connecticut to fund the implementation of CONNEX Marketplace as a way for the state’s manufacturers and suppliers to discover and engage with each other.
Lavoie and Davis oversaw “an incredible implementation,” in Connecticut; today there are over 2,500 organizations in the state database. (Davis and company have been just as successful throughout the U.S., and globally. CONNEX now has some 200,000 searchable manufacturers/suppliers.)
“How impactful is this?” asks Lavoie.
“Early on, Alan and I were sitting with a company that couldn't find a supplier for a critical need; it was screwing up production. We said, ‘Let's do a live search right now.’ We found a company 45 miles away. This was a Friday; they said they’d be there Monday morning.”
We’ll look closely at this idea of heretofore unidentified localized suppliers in part two.
First, let’s fast forward to those UNH students making a difference in our domestic manufacturing industry.
Students To The Supply-Chain Rescue
Lavoie joined UNH after the university in 2024 purchased a 133,000 sq ft building to locate what is now called the Elevation Center. It wasn’t long before Lavoie and Davis had the idea to plug the university into i5 Solutions and the CONNEX platform.
The relationship was formally announced as a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a national Supply Chain Resiliency Hub at the university to help U.S. manufacturers identify suppliers, assess risk, and build more resilient supply chains.
UNH students do the heavy lifting in “strategic alliances combining academic expertise and cutting-edge digital tools to strengthen regional manufacturing supply chains.”
First, students help companies locate domestic suppliers. “Not all organizations have time or resources to spend on this for each need,” says Lavoie, “and I have a labor pool that's screaming for experiential learning opportunities.” They want part of the mission.
In fact, under the leadership of UNH professors, students pursue a variety of projects.
"I have students building AI applications for companies; some are industrial engineering students analyzing shop floors and making recommendations on improvements; we have students working on robotics projects," Lavoie says.
Students are “faculty-driven and led” and conduct supply-chain risk analyses, identify factors like single-source vulnerabilities; research alternative suppliers and help build supplier-development plans.
“These aren't internships; they are real projects with real companies. It’s paid work – the companies pay the university; we pay the students. The output comes from the University of New Haven, through i5 Services, and for example, to an organization such as Pfizer.”
“Industry tells us the biggest challenge is that college students lack relevant job experience. The way for us to solve that is to provide students that training.
Davis adds that the impact of CONNEX Marketplace and relationships such as those at UNH is felt in advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, AI, and increasingly in the bio/pharma supply chain.
We can use all the help we can get. Perhaps particularly at this point in history, in the U.S. manufacturing sector, but also globally.
Lavoie and Davis have paired their motivations and missions.
They operate as evangelists form the university setting to the facilities at our largest companies, offering opportunities for better business outcomes, and creating more purpose-led careers for us to marvel over in coming years.
-----------
Also see:
The U.S. Supply-Chain Uncovered: A Superior Search For Domestic Suppliers