Lloydspharmacy has developed a bespoke dispensary system
for its 1,520 outlets that lets head-office staff see how much
stock is held in its pharmacies and how medicines are being
distributed.
It is believed to be the first such system adopted by a
nationwide pharmacy chain.
The retailer, which has UK sales of £1.3bn a year, wants better
visibility of its stock in each pharmacy in order to boost
profitability, efficiency and free staff time to allow pharmacists
to give more advice to customers.
Lloydspharmacy’s head of business intelligence, Ian Fereday,
said, “We will see what is going out through the door and have a
clearer understanding of the profitability of individual
stores.”
When the dispensary system goes live across the stores later
this year, staff at head office will be able to see how much
working capital is tied up in each pharmacy.
The in-store system will feed the information into the head
office business intelligence application, called Microstrategy 7.5,
which also integrates with Lloydspharmacy’s merchandising execution
system.
Although the retailer implemented a new electronic point of sale
system less than four years ago, for this project it still needed
to develop a separate dispensary system to provide Microstrategy
with accurate store volumes.
Fereday said, “Using our bespoke application Compass, we will
grab dispensary data out of the stores and integrate it within our
business intelligence platform. The process within a pharmacy is
very complicated and no one has delivered that process as an
off-the-shelf application.”
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