When Firefighting Becomes Foresight: Inside Teleflex’s Planning Transformation

Published on: August 26, 2026
6 read min

In a medical device supply chain, planning cannot stop at demand and supply.

Regulatory approvals, product versioning, manufacturing capacity, customer commitments, and inventory all interact. A change to one component can affect where a product can be shipped, which customers can receive it, and how quickly the supply network needs to respond.

For Teleflex, that complexity had become increasingly difficult to manage through siloed processes, manual workflows, and fragmented systems.

“We had no standardized S&OP process,” said Rose Prendergast, Senior Director, Supply Chain Command Center & Analytics at Teleflex. “We also had very high inventory and limited visibility as to why we had high inventory.”

That challenge led to Project Phoenix, Teleflex’s transformation of its planning environment with o9.

Connecting a highly regulated supply chain

Teleflex’s end-to-end supply chain includes more than traditional planning functions.

Regulatory, compliance, and R&D all play an important role because products can only be shipped into markets once the correct approvals, configurations, and versions are in place.

A product transition may happen quickly in one country and take years in another. During that period, Teleflex may need to manage multiple versions of the same product across different markets.

“If one single thing changes in the regulatory requirements for a component, that has a knock-on effect to all of our customers,” Prendergast said.

Before the transformation, many of those transitions were handled manually.

The company was also managing competing planning priorities. Supply chain teams wanted to build according to demand signals, while manufacturing teams were measured against capacity and annual operating plans.

Without a shared planning process, there was limited cross-functional agreement about which inventory should be built, reduced, or prioritized.

Teleflex wanted a platform that could connect these decisions and show the consequences of changes across the network.

According to Prendergast, o9 stood out because it could provide that level of end-to-end visibility.

Seeing the impact before the customer feels it

One of Teleflex’s main requirements was the ability to trace issues through the entire supply chain.

If a raw material becomes constrained, a component changes, or a regulatory requirement affects a product, planners need to understand which customer orders could eventually be affected.

The new supply planning capability allows Teleflex to peg supply and demand across the network and see those relationships in detail.

“We can always see, at any time, if we’re constrained, which individual customer, which order line in which country do we have an issue with,” Prendergast said.

This changes the timing of the response.

Teams can begin communicating with customers before a shortage becomes an immediate service problem. They can also assess the downstream effects of commercial, manufacturing, or supply decisions before committing to them.

Teleflex has also introduced demand-prioritized supply planning, while retaining the ability to account for manufacturing capacity.

The company can see when additional production makes sense and understand the inventory consequences of that decision.

Automating complex product transitions

Product versioning has historically been one of the most labor-intensive parts of Teleflex’s planning process.

A new version of a medical device cannot simply replace the old one everywhere at once. Markets transition at different speeds depending on regulatory approvals.

Teleflex, therefore, needs to manage the phase-in and phase-out of different versions while maintaining the correct supply for each country.

The company previously relied on teams to manage much of this process manually.

Prendergast said some transitions that could take years to coordinate can now be managed automatically through the planning system.

That automation reduces manual effort and gives planners a clearer view of how product changes will affect demand, supply, and inventory.

Preparing for a global go-live

Teleflex chose to implement demand planning globally first, followed by supply planning globally.

The company also invested heavily in preparation.

A dedicated center of excellence brought together subject matter experts, while Teleflex hired an internal o9 architect with previous implementation experience.

“This was the best thing that we did within our whole project,” Prendergast said.

That internal knowledge helped the team identify issues quickly and make decisions without placing the full burden of the project on business teams that still needed to run day-to-day operations.

Training and change management received similar attention.

Teleflex spent six months training end users before go-live and ran six months of change management workshops. The company also completed several mock cutovers before the final launch.

The preparation worked from a technical perspective.

“We actually had a perfect technical cutover,” Prendergast said. “We had a really, really successful go-live.”

Then, as she put it, the real project began.

Changing the planner from firefighter to forward thinker

The biggest adjustment came from the visibility the new system created.

Planners could suddenly see problems much further into the future.

That was a major shift for teams accustomed to reacting to shortages and back orders once they became urgent.

“Planners have always been firefighters,” Prendergast said. “They’ve been our heroes all along in supply chain.”

The new planning environment changes that role.

“We don’t need them to be superheroes anymore,” she said. “We need them to focus on the forward-looking.”

Seeing a projected back order a year in advance initially created discomfort for commercial teams.

Prendergast argued that this visibility should be seen as an advantage. The issue already exists in the future plan. The difference is that the company now has time to act before it reaches the customer.

This required a change in mindset across the organization.

Leadership also had to reconsider the metrics being used to evaluate performance. Many existing measures were backward-looking and reinforced reactive behavior.

End-to-end visibility created a long list of future issues that teams could now see. The challenge became learning how to prioritize and address them one by one.

“We’re reducing the back order before it happens, not firefighting it when it happens,” Prendergast said.

Early results from the transformation

Teleflex is already seeing measurable improvements.

Planning cycle times have fallen by 25%, forecast accuracy has increased by 11%, back orders are down 5%, and inventory has been reduced by 10%.

Prendergast sees these results as an early stage of the transformation.

Teleflex is now looking ahead to further capabilities, including IBP, inventory optimization, intelligent operations, and agentic AI.

The challenge is deciding how quickly the organization can absorb the next wave of change.

Technology can move faster than people and processes.

When the technology is ready before the organization

According to Prendergast, this has become one of the most important lessons from Project Phoenix.

The company invested heavily in change management before implementation. Even so, preparing people for transformation and experiencing that transformation are very different things.

Automation changes the work people perform. Manual steps disappear, roles evolve, and new skills become necessary.

Prendergast believes executive leadership needs to take ownership of those consequences before introducing additional technology.

“The advancement in technology drives efficiency, and efficiency means that there’s fewer manual steps in everyone’s jobs,” she said. “Roles will change and some roles are disappearing.”

That creates a difficult question for Teleflex.

Should the company pause to allow the business more time to adopt what has already been introduced, or keep pushing forward so that new ways of working become established more quickly?

There is no simple answer.

Prendergast ended with an analogy that captures where Teleflex currently finds itself.

“We want to buy a Ferrari, but we’re still learning to drive, and we’re still a little bit afraid about how fast it can go.”

The technology has given Teleflex more visibility, stronger planning capabilities, and measurable improvements in performance.

The next challenge is making sure the organization is ready to use that capability fully.