The pharmacy business is becoming increasingly risky due to a sharp increase in competition. One of the tools in the struggle for profitability in these conditions is the automation of pharmacies and the transfer of processes under the control of programs for accounting for goods. Therefore, the business needs to take a closer look at the benefits of such software. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of the pharmacy management system and its influence on business growth.
The standard functionality of the pharmacy automation solutions
When choosing a solution to automate a pharmacy, it is necessary to take into account many factors: functionality, service support, cost, and others. As a result, the application should optimize workflows as much as possible and lead to an increase in business profitability. In this case, the functionality of the software is important, which directly affects the final degree of automation of the outlet.
The most popular features of pharmacy solutions are:
- The formation, input, and accounting of primary documents: waybills, invoices, and others.
- Keeping a log of receipts of goods to the pharmacy.
- Setting up pricing strategies, and pricing control.
- Control of expiration dates of each item in the assortment.
- Formation of prompts when planning purchases, taking into account the available stocks.
- Control of rejected batches of goods.
- Formation of analytical and financial reporting for managers.
- Integration with online cash registers and popular accounting applications.
- Ability to display instructions for medicines.
- Availability of a CRM system.
- Support for discount cards.
- Consolidated accounting of the pharmacy network.
- Registration of warehouse operations, inventories, and write-offs.
- Remote access to the database.
- Support for mobile terminals.
It is also necessary to select software for the inclusion of goods in a pharmacy, taking into account business prospects.
Benefits of pharmacy automation programs
The benefits of pharmacy automation solutions directly depend on the depth of the changes being made. The more areas of activity affected by this process, the better the result will be. The solution offered by Empeek is perfect for the complex automation of stores, retail outlets, and pharmacies. Its benefits can be roughly divided into four categories: benefits for the enterprise as a whole, for employees, managers, and for customers.
The advantages for the pharmacy
Pharmacy automation programs allow you to increase the turnover of the pharmacy by accelerating customer service and expanding the range without additional injections into a turnover. This is facilitated by strict inventory control and optimal procurement planning.
Increasing customer loyalty through the introduction of discount cards increases the competitiveness of the pharmacy and helps, at a minimum, to maintain its market share.
The use of pre-order data helps to quickly credit products to the warehouse when they actually arrive. As a result, medicines can be on the shelves within hours of delivery.
Control of expiration dates allows you to determine the stale goods in time and offer them to customers in the first place. This functionality reduces the percentage of drug write-offs and reduces financial costs.
Benefits for management
The pharmacy automation solutions provide managers and owners with a set of analytical tools for analyzing sales, evaluating staff, and identifying negative and positive trends. These applications allow you to view trading volumes and profits by each seller. As a result, an entrepreneur can reward some employees and identify the reasons for low performance in others.
Such solutions allow you to keep consolidated records for several pharmacies at the same time. As a result, access to the indicators of each outlet is always at hand.
In addition, you can enter the manager’s office remotely through cloud services using a browser. This improves the efficiency of management and makes it easier for the manager to plan the working day.
Benefits for employees
It becomes easier for employees to work with pharmacy automation solutions. The number of manual routine operations for reconciling data in different documents is reduced. It becomes possible to conduct an inventory in electronic form using a tablet or mobile terminal.
The need for maintaining paper internal reports and journals is reduced. The program automatically compiles them in electronic form on the basis of primary documentation and postings.
The pharmacy automation solutions allow you to create multi-level product directories. Commodity items can be assigned arbitrary characteristics, which is convenient to systematize the nomenclature. As a result, the search for medicines is much faster.
What nuances should be paid attention to when choosing pharmacy automation solutions
Regardless of the software chosen, it is useful for the owner or manager of a pharmacy (pharmacy chain) to pay attention to the following nuances that characterize the automation of pharmaceutical retail.
- For the effective use of the automated pricing mechanism, it is necessary that the pharmacy accounting system has a nomenclature guide for all commodity items.
- If it does not exist, then the list of available tools for automating pricing will be minimal (as an option, limited to a fixed margin on the purchase price of a pharmaceutical). In turn, the most competitive modern pharmacies take into account a large number of factors when automating pricing – the assignment of goods to one category or another, various marker positions, and classes of goods according to consumption dynamics.
- It is desirable to unify the names of pharmaceuticals when interacting with suppliers.
- It often happens that one business entity has the same name for medicine, while its counterparty has a completely different one. This circumstance interferes with the automation (for example, preventing the full use of digital invoices) of the work of both the first and second enterprises.
- It should be noted that in practice such unification is complicated due to the lack of industry-wide registers with a single product range. But it is quite feasible when using the same accounting software by counterparties. Thus, one factor in the selection of pharmacy automation software may be the characteristics of the product used by the supplier.
- Don’t neglect the timely access to open sources, which reflect data on rejected supplies of pharmaceuticals.
The task of the owner or director of a pharmacy is to provide a sustainable mechanism for updating commodity accounting registers, which reflect rejected batches of medicines, by obtaining data from relevant open sources. At the stage of purchasing inventory accounting software, you should find out to what extent, and with the help of what software tools, the functionality for gaining access to sources of information about rejected pharmaceuticals is implemented in a specific solution from its supplier.
Conclusion
The organization of the pharmacy business, like any modern retail enterprise, requires, based on the laws of the market today, the most efficient automation of various areas of business management. Empeek develops solutions for business process automation, high-load systems, systems using artificial intelligence, and more. The specialists of the company have experience in creating solutions of varying complexity depending on business requirements, including the pharmaceutical industry.