When it’s time to stock your front end, have you ever thought about how much time it takes? If you walk through your pharmacy shelf by shelf to see what needs to be ordered, you’re wasting valuable time and possibly making errors in your counting.
While not every point-of-sale system (POS) will be able to handle your front end, one that is capable will require some investment. They aren’t free, but your manual processes aren’t either. In fact, they’re costing you each and every day.
Here are four that are costing you the most:
Work Hours Wasted
If your employees have to walk the shelves in order to create an order list or to analyze items from a report and manually create a purchase order, you’re wasting dollars and losing effectiveness.
By spending time on manual processes, you could’ve been spending money on other, more productive projects or ones you didn’t have to pay out at all. Ideally, you’d automatically generate electronic purchase orders through a process using replenishment or min/max logic.
Check your shelves regularly and keep them clean and neat. But allow the POS front-end management tools to do their job.
Dwindling Sales
Products eventually become out-of-stock and nearly impossible to find. Especially if your wholesaler is backordered. Manual processes only make it worse. Sometimes a team member can’t get to every section. Or someone calls in sick, leaving you understaffed. Your manual processes can fall through the cracks at any moment. So, it’s best to automate what you can through your point-of-sale.
Incorrect Pricing
Are your pricing and receiving processes still linked? If so, you might have pricing errors. When item pricing doesn’t match up with system pricing, it can cause lost profits. For example, if an item’s suggested retail increases but the sticker price isn’t updated.
When you manage updates in pricing through your point-of-sale, POS-generated shelf labels can help keep things accurate and save a lot of time. And for bulk price updates that come through, the system will only print labels for the products your pharmacy carries. From there, you can figure out when the price changes should go into effect so you have enough time for getting new labels on the shelf.
Meaningless Data
Imagine that your cost of manual front-end processes shows that your data doesn’t mean anything. This could be because it doesn’t exist in a way that’s accessible, or perhaps there isn’t any accurate information feeding in. Therefore, if you don’t have the right data, making business decisions will be tough. It could pan out, but then again, you might lose opportunities. This is where a point-of-sale system comes into play. It will always tell you what’s up.
A Member-Owned Company Serving Independent Pharmacies
PBA Health is dedicated to helping independent pharmacies reach their full potential on the buy-side of their business. Founded and run by pharmacists, PBA Health serves independent pharmacies with group purchasing services, wholesaler contract negotiations, proprietary purchasing tools, and more.
An HDA member, PBA Health operates its own NABP-accredited warehouse with more than 6,000 SKUs, including brands, generics, narcotics CII-CV, cold-storage products, and over-the-counter (OTC) products — offering the lowest prices in the secondary market.
