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Tacy Foster

PartnerCarolinas

Specializes in helping pharmaceutical and medical-product clients transform their quality and manufacturing performance and ensure supply chain resilience

Based in McKinsey’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina, Tacy brings more than 15 years of operations experience to her clients, eight of which were spent in industry. She works primarily with pharmaceuticals and medical products, and is focused on quality management system transformations, increasing the visibility of supply chain risks and vulnerabilities, and driving operations performance improvements.

Examples of her recent work include the following:

  • enhancing planning and external manufacturing processes to ensure efficiency of vaccine manufacturing
  • leading a supply chain resilience diagnostic across a pharmaceutical company’s internal manufacturing network, identifying critical risks and mitigation plans
  • developing a holistic supplier risk assessment for a medical technology company, including the governance process, which ensured the manufacturer was able to continue operations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
  • developing an integration plan for the operations organizations for the merger of two pharmaceutical companies
  • mapping an end-to-end supply chain and identifying areas of risk for counterfeiting, diversion, and theft of a life-saving product for a pharmaceutical company
  • transforming a quality organization through reducing redundancies, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and increasing agility to better respond and mitigate quality-related issues. Also implemented proactive measures to fully eliminate issues and identified more than 30 synergies worth $10 million
  • implementing a quality risk-driven approach for managing third-party suppliers at a large pharmaceutical manufacturer, which increased visibility of issues and reduced firefighting
  • creating a business case and method to transform the quality management system of a pharmaceutical company to be more agile and support faster speed to market of life-saving drugs
  • reducing product release time by 80 percent for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer through simplifying and standardizing the quality review process and reducing wait and unnecessary transportation time
  • creating and implementing an FDA-compliant quality management system for a technology company designing and developing medical devices

Published Work

Supply chains: Still vulnerable,” McKinsey & Company, October 2024

Tech and regionalization bolster supply chains, but complacency looms,” McKinsey & Company, November 2023

Taking the pulse of shifting supply chains,” McKinsey & Company, August 2022

Supply chains: To build resilience, manage proactively,” McKinsey & Company, May 2022

Making quality assurance smart,” McKinsey & Company, January 2021

The resilience imperative for medtech supply chains,” McKinsey & Company, December 2020

Smart quality: Reimaging the way quality works,” McKinsey & Company, January 2021

Past Experience

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Leaders for global operations fellow

Nike
Global supply-chain innovation research fellow

Novartis AG
Meningitis vaccine value-chain manager

DuPont
Environmental-systems data manager

Education

MIT Sloan School of Management
MBA

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MS, engineering

Pennsylvania State University
BS, chemical engineering