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Paulo Torres has spent the entirety of his professional career ensuring that vital materials reach their intended destinations. The executive for USCAN logistics and fulfillment operations at GE HealthCare has proven himself indispensable across multiple continents, numerous regions, and, at this point, millions of miles. His role at present is to orchestrate the network that keeps life-saving equipment and parts moving across the US and Canada, but it all began in his home country of Brazil.
Torres’s long tenure inside GE, one that encompasses nearly the entirety of his career, began as a college internship. And it wasn’t one he even was searching for.
“I was trying to finish a different internship at the time, and then I wanted to get back to studying my schoolwork,” Torres recalls. “But a colleague of mine showed me an opportunity at GE. Because my English was pretty good, he told me I should go for it, and I wound up working within GE Transportation.”
The internship was in supply chain, Torres’ eventual gateway to logistics. After graduating from college, Torres was selected for GE’s Operations Management Leadership Program (OMLP), a highly structured two-year program with four six-month rotations across different supply chain functions in GE Aviation and GE Healthcare. Those rotations gave him hands-on experience in materials, logistics, planning, operations, and leadership skills. They also helped lead him to his first assignments within GE HealthCare in Brazil.
It was within one of those final rotations that his career path became clear. As part of a team launching GE HealthCare’s Pharmaceutical Diagnostics (PDx) division in Brazil, he was charged with designing the end‑to‑end logistics model—transportation, warehousing, import/export flows, and distribution—entirely from the ground up.
“That was when I truly fell in love with logistics,” Torres says. “I felt that I had found my home.”
The products Torres supported early on were contrast media used before CT and MRI scans, the quiet but essential agents that dictate whether a radiologist has the clarity needed to make the right call when it matters most.
Visiting customers and hospitals, Torres says he began to appreciate the stakes of moving critical equipment and supplies. “I could see that I was not only helping get the product from point A to point B, but I was ensuring that the patients could get the treatment that they needed,” the executive explains.
After several years in Brazil, including temporarily stepping outside of supply chain and into a regional role as a commercial project manager for Latin America, Torres decided to pursue an opportunity in the US. GE HealthCare’s global logistics leadership tapped Torres for a role in Chicago area, bringing him back squarely into logistics and tasked with transporting radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine.
He relocated outside of Chicago to Arlington Heights to support a plant manufacturing radioactive materials with extremely short half‑lives, where even small delays can render product unusable. It was Torres’s remit to ensure that patient doses were delivered precisely when needed for PET and other advanced scans. Torres led logistics for that radiopharma division, eventually expanding his remit to cover additional 3PL warehouse operations and, later, the broader Americas region for the pharma business.
Today, Torres’s team oversees international and domestic inbound transportation to about fifteen manufacturing sites and roughly eight warehouses, as well as outbound transportation to hospitals, clinics, and service field engineers across both countries. They manage eight regional distribution centers, coordinate last‑mile delivery of healthcare parts and equipment—from CT and MRI systems to Ultrasound and Monitoring Solutions units and more—and a customer solutions team tasked with finding faster ways to get critical service parts into the field.
Looking back on his broad career, Torres says his work is shaped by a relentless focus on customer experience and a belief in empowering teams to overcome challenges and succeed. Today, his sights are set on strengthening on‑time delivery, building greater agility into issue resolution, enhancing support in the moments that matter most for customers and patients, and unlocking logistics as a strategic driver of GE HealthCare’s future growth.
When asked about advice regarding professionals moving to the US to pursue opportunities, his first answer came quickly.
“Be sure you’re ready for winter,” Torres says, laughing. “I got on the plane in São Paulo, and it was one hundred degrees. I got off the plane in Chicago, and it was zero.”
More seriously (though a hundred-degree swing should be serious for anyone), Torres emphasizes how important the health of the entire familial unit moving for such an opportunity.
“You have to make sure you’re taking care of your family,” he says. “If you’re working hard at the office, you need to think about the partner who might be spending ten or twelve hours a day at home. You have to be in sync with your partner.”
“I could see that I was not only helping get the product from point A to point B, but I was ensuring that the patients could get the treatment that they needed.”
Paulo Torres
For Torres and his family, that means ensuring that his children stay connected with their Brazilian roots, finding time to FaceTime or visit his and his wife’s home country whenever possible.
Transporting an entire family to Brazil and back may be the easiest logistical trip Torres has on his calendar.
For 35+ years, Watchpoint Logistics has mastered the high-stakes world of healthcare supply chains. We don’t just move boxes, we operate as your single-source “Control Tower,” turning fragmented logistics into a seamless, data-driven ecosystem designed for medical devices and life sciences.
Standard logistics models often crumble under healthcare’s complexity – Watchpoint thrives there. We build tailored programs for our customer partners from airtight temperature-controlled storage to hyper-responsive inventory replenishment, ensuring your critical assets move with surgical precision.
But the real Watchpoint edge? Our people. We’ve ditched the corporate script for a culture of empathy and humility, earning us a 90%+ customer satisfaction rate. To us, your life-saving cargo is never just a transaction; it’s a mission. Our experts don’t just manage your supply chain; they own it.
