The medical priority routes. I want Naomi to rerun the reliability analysis with a different sorting parameter. Tyler's expression adjusted subtly. We've run that twice already. The numbers.
I want them sorted by reliability coefficient, not distance efficiency. Clare paused. Specifically, I want to see how many times in the past 6 months a route was flagged as optimal but failed to meet the delivery window. Naomi Pierce had been quiet throughout the presentation, her laptop open, her face carrying the particular expression of someone whose job requires knowing more than they are currently allowed to say. She was the youngest person at the table by nearly a decade, and she had been careful for most of her tenure at Von Meridian about the timing of what she offered and what she held back, but she recognized the question Clare was asking.
She had wondered about the same thing herself. "I can have that by end of morning," Naomi said. The results came back in 2 hours. Clare, Naomi, and Brooke went through them in Clare's office with the door closed and the blinds adjusted against the glare. What the reanalysis showed was not a minor discrepancy.
What it showed was a systematic pattern. The routing algorithm had been consistently selecting paths that minimized fuel and distance, but had substantially higher failure rates on time-sensitive medical deliveries. The pattern held across 11 metropolitan corridors. The shortfall in Hailbridge's satisfaction scores was not random variation. It was the predictable output of a system that had been optimized for the wrong variable for at least 14 months.
Naomi leaned back from the screen. Someone would have had to see this in the raw data, she said carefully. Yes, Clare said. This didn't hide itself. No.
Brooke, who had spent part of her morning doing what Brooke was very good at, finding out who people were, said a one-page summary on the desk. His name is Rhett Callaway. He was VP of operations at a national carrier for 6 years. Before that, he managed root recovery for two regional distributors and consulted on supply chain restructuring for a hospital network in the Pacific Northwest. He left the corporate track about 3 years ago.
He's been independent since. No firm, no partners, single father. Clare read the summary once, set it down, and did not read it again. Set up a meeting, she said. Today if he's available.