On March 11, 2026, Stryker’s global Microsoft environment was wiped by a cyberattack attributed to an Iran-linked threat actor. Devices were remotely disabled, employees were told to disconnect from all networks, and the electronic ordering system went offline. It was three weeks before all systems were said to be fully restored.

If you’re a supply chain leader at a health system that relies on Stryker for orthopedic implants, Mako robotic surgery consumables, Vocera hardware, or LifePak devices, that information should concern you.

The disruption is more than theoretical. The question is whether your inventory position can absorb it.

Every time a major supply chain event occurs, whether a cyberattack, port shutdown, recall or natural disaster, the conversation immediately focuses on the vendor. What happened? How long will it take to fix? Who is responsible?

For a supply chain leader, however, the first question should be: What is my exposure, right now, based on what I have on hand?

If you can answer that with confidence because you know your current inventory position against periodic automatic replenishment (PAR), which single-source items are at risk, and how many days of Stryker implant stock you have across your system, you can manage this disruption. If you can’t answer it cleanly, you have a PAR problem. not a Stryker problem.

The Stryker situation is acute and visible, but the inventory vulnerability it’s exposing was already there. The cyberattack is the event that made it impossible to ignore.

How PAR Levels Actually Get Set

At most health systems, someone set PAR levels, often years ago, based on average usage and standard vendor lead times. They’ve been adjusted periodically, usually reactively. A stockout happens and the PAR goes up. A cost initiative hits and they get trimmed.

What very few organizations do systematically is evaluate PAR levels through a disruption lens. That means asking not just how much inventory is needed to meet normal demand, but how much is needed to keep operating if a supplier can’t accept orders for seven, 14 or 30 days.

Those are two very different numbers. For single-source, high-criticality items, the gap between them is where operational risk lives.

In the military, you plan for the scenario where your primary supply line fails. You know your days of supply, alternatives, and exactly what you can and can’t substitute. That discipline doesn’t transfer automatically to healthcare supply chains, but the logic is the same. When your supplier goes offline, you need to know your position before you need to know anything else.

Many hospitals don’t know what they have, where it is or how much is left. That lack of visibility means they can’t make informed or timely decisions when something goes wrong. Many believe their inventory practices are solid, but when they examine the data, the accuracy is nowhere near what they assumed.

A Real Disruption Buffer

For items sourced predominantly from a single supplier with no approved substitute, PAR levels need to account for a disruption scenario, not just normal replenishment. In practice, that means several things: Identifying every item in your formulary where a single supplier is your only source. Calculating current days on hand against realistic usage rates. Setting a disruption buffer on top of your standard PAR for those items (typically 15 to 30 additional days, depending on criticality and substitutability). Having pre-approved alternatives on contract before an emergency, not during one. And knowing which items your surgeons will accept a substitution for and which they will not.

That last point carries more operational weight than most supply chain leaders get credit for. Surgeon preference is a real variable in implant supply continuity, and it needs to be part of disruption planning from the start, not addressed when a case is about to be rescheduled.

The operational challenge in a disruption like this isn’t only about stock levels; it’s also about visibility. Can you pull an accurate picture of your Stryker-sourced inventory right now, across all facilities, including consignment?

Most health systems can’t do that quickly. Inventory data lives across multiple systems; consignment is often tracked manually or not at all, and the data that does exist is frequently out of date. When a disruption hits, supply chain teams end up running physical counts and calling OR coordinators rather than working from current information.

That is a failure of the operating model, specifically the absence of a visibility infrastructure that makes disruption response fast and data-driven rather than slow and reactive.

A disruption like this not only creates new problems, it surfaces the ones that were already there.

The Consignment Problem

Consignment inventory sits at the intersection of two challenges that most supply chain teams haven’t fully solved: You don’t own it until it’s used, and in many cases, you can’t tell exactly what you have or where it is without a physical count.

The Stryker outage is exposing this in real time. Health systems that rely on Stryker consignment for orthopedic and surgical implants are finding out that their system-of-record data is incomplete. Consignment tracking in most facilities is still largely manual, managed through spreadsheets, rep-maintained logs, or periodic reconciliation processes that weren’t designed for disruption response.

What that means practically is that supply chain teams are pulling people off other work to conduct physical counts across ORs, procedure rooms, and storage locations. That’s not a quick task. For a mid-sized health system with multiple facilities and a deep Stryker consignment portfolio, a full physical count can take days and significant manpower. The data you need in the first 24 hours of a disruption is exactly the data that takes the longest to surface.

The case scheduling question compounds this. The decisions supply chain leaders are being asked to make right now include: Can this hip replacement scheduled for Thursday proceed based on what we have on hand, or do we reschedule? Can we substitute the implant system and get surgeon buy-in in time? If we reschedule, how far out, and what does that do to OR utilization and revenue?

Those decisions require accurate, item-level consignment data. Without it, the default is a phone call to the Stryker rep, who may or may not be reachable, and who’s working from the same disrupted systems as everyone else.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline before the disruption, not during it. Consignment inventory needs to be tracked in the same system as owned inventory, reconciled on a defined cycle, and accessible to supply chain leadership without requiring a physical count to get a reliable number. That‘s the standard most organizations haven’t yet reached. This Stryker outage is a clear demonstration of what it costs not to.

What to Do This Week

• Get an accurate picture of your current Stryker-sourced inventory position, not an estimate. You need actual on-hand quantities by item, by location, including consignment. If you can’t pull that quickly, that’s the first gap to address.
• Identify your single-source exposure across the full formulary, not just Stryker. Map every supplier where you have no approved alternative.
• Talk to OR leadership now. Know which cases depend on Stryker items in the next 30 days, which can be substituted, and which can’t. That conversation should not happen during a scheduling crisis.
• Activate your GPO and distributor relationships. If emergency sourcing becomes necessary, those channels need to be warm before you need them.
• Document what you learned. Whatever gaps this situation exposes in your inventory visibility, PAR settings or alternative sourcing readiness, write them down and use them as the basis for a structured review. The worst outcome from a disruption like this is returning to the same practices once it passes.

Most supply chain organizations already have a sense of where their inventory practices fall short. The data accuracy isn’t where it should be; the PAR levels haven’t been reviewed in years, and the visibility infrastructure is incomplete. But the urgency to address it keeps getting displaced by immediate operational demands.

In any logistics environment, the work that’s hardest to justify in calm conditions is exactly the work that determines how you perform when conditions aren’t calm. Readiness is built before you need it, not during.

Stryker has put PAR levels and inventory visibility at the top of the agenda for hospital leadership. That creates an opening. The supply chain leaders who use it well will come out of this with a stronger operating model. Those who treat it as a temporary disruption to weather will find themselves in the same position the next time something breaks.

If your CSCO or CFO is asking questions about supply chain resilience right now, bring them a structured assessment of where you stand, not a reassurance. That’s a conversation worth having, and this is the right moment to have it.

Ed Barber is senior vice president of advisory, point of use and MRO solutions at RiseNow.