West Coast Pharmacy Case Study
[pic 1]OSCM 5130 S60Group Term Project: West Coast PharmacyDue to an increase in patient services, West Coast Pharmacy has seen a significant increase in business; however, they have not been able to meet their customer expectations in relation to the wait time for these drop-off prescriptions. “Walk-in” customers make up 85% of West Coast Pharmacy’s business. It is extremely important for them to retain these customers because past analysis has shown that, on average, each walk-in customer will purchase $15.00 worth of additional goods from the store each time they visit. The average gross margin on non-prescription merchandise is 28%. The owner of West Coast Pharmacy realizes that they have a short window of opportunity to fix this problem, otherwise they risk losing these walk-in customers to the competition. West Coast Pharmacy understands that “ready when promised” is a key driver of customer experience. Wait time starts when a customer gets in-line to drop off a prescription to the point the customer is notified the prescription is ready to be picked up.Customer satisfaction surveys have indicated that walk-in customers expect prescriptions to be ready in less than 10 minutes. West Coast Pharmacy would like to start guaranteeing a 10-minute wait time for prescriptions and measuring “ready when promised”. They believe to provide a better customer experience than the competition, they need to be able to achieve this metric 98% of the time.
Ready When Promised = # of Rxs delivered at the promised time Total number of Rxs filledWest Coast Pharmacy is open 10 hours per day, 7 days a week. The owner did some data collection for the last 4 weeks and determined that a total of 33,600 prescriptions were either completed or could have been completed. From the 4 weeks of data collection, the average daily demand is around 24,000 pills so roughly 1,400 to 1,500 pills of each kind. The owner also observed that sometimes, prescriptions cannot be completed through the regular process since there is missing or unreadable information. This causes “rework” for about 25 walk-in prescriptions per day and which takes an average of 10 minutes to rework.West Coast Pharmacy Positions:Prescription Order Taker – accept prescription requests from customersRunner – move prescriptions throughout pharmacyCounter – fill prescription bottlesDouble-Checker – check filled prescriptionsPharmacist – confirm filled prescriptions and provide regulatory oversightAccounting Rate Clerk – determine unit cost and discount rate; prepare insurance chargeback formAccounting Invoicing Clerk – calculate amount due and complete sales invoiceCashier – deliver completed prescription to customer and collect payment[pic 2]High Level Flow:[pic 3]Suggested layout for the first run is as follows: NOTE: layout may have to change dependent on training room layout. If you need to change the suggested layout, make it as inefficient as possible for the first run.