Provided by The Pharmacy Chick
“Inventory Management”. If you have ever worked for a company where a product is sold, managing inventory, especially one that deteriorates over time, is a paramount issue. I just recently compiled and returned my quarterly inventory and even wrote about it in a post called Reverse Distribution. All in all, I returned approximately $5300.00 in outdated drugs, of which I will probably get about 20-30% credit ( if that). You can see that managing inventory ( reducing how much I have over all and what I have to return) can be a big deal in the corporate office. Multiply that by thousands of stores and you have serious dollars evaporating.
This year they have been pitbulls ( and I dont mean to offend pitbulls) about inventory. In THEIR perfect world, we would stock NOTHING, and order EVERYTHING overnight for the previous days prescriptions, and repeat the procedure daily. I feel comfortable with about 240k in inventory…they want me to have no more than 193k. That 47k disparity causes a lot of grief. Nevertheless we have to play THIER game so I do my best to get inventory down.
I think its important to keep certain drugs in stock. We cannot operate if we can’t fill certain kinds of rx’s on demand. That being said, we do not have to stock everything…all the time.
Ms Penny Wise transferred her files from Big Box a couple of months ago. She had moved. Before we actually transferred a thing, I knew she would be trouble. she clutched her bottles like they were a state secret or something and interviewed me like I was applying for a job…with HER. What are my hours…do we have emergency services…do I deliver…do I have a return policy ( seriously?? NO..)…who is my wholesaler…. do I bill loyalty cards….and on and on. At some point I no longer cared if we got her business. When she finally forked over her bottles, I noticed she had a pile of expensive acne stuff for her 2 kids. She asked me ” do you carry this?” I knew where this conversation was going. I told her that we can get all of it, but we do not just stock it…we order it when we get a prescription for it. She let out some kind of *tsk* and said that if she were to transfer here, she wanted a GUARANTEE that we would stock these items. She said…” I believe its a reasonable request”
I really didn’t have much to lose, she wasn’t my customer yet. so I told her ” not to be disrespectful to your needs, but you have a pile of drugs that total thousands of dollars right here. We get deliveries 5 days each week, we are unable to have these kinds of dollars sitting here idle for 29 days each month. Provided you do NOT order them on a Friday/Saturday, we can get them overnight.” I even pulled the “poor economy” card and told her that the company is managing its dollars very carefully just like she probably is in her household.
I request that all of my high dollar customers call me a day or two in advance. I let them know ahead of time so we are all on the same page. I even have stickers that state ” SPECIAL ORDER ITEM ORDER AHEAD OF TIME” They all get used to it.
She will too. She decided to hand me the bottles and boxes and I transferred all of the rx’s from BB. She didn’t need them yet..” Ill call you when we need them”. 60 days later she still hasn’t ordered anything.
And THAT end justified the means.
The Pharmacy Chick is a retail pharmacist in the Western United States, gutting it out in fairly busy store. She ticks off each day as one more day closer to retirement, after 22 years in the biz. She remembers typewriters, rolls of labels, want books, and everybody paid cash. Now all she wants to remember is what all her passwords are!
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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