Getting Business Savvy with POS
by Will Lockwood / ComputerTalk
Hemingway, S.C., is a farming community about an hour from Myrtle Beach where you’ll find three stop lights. You’ll also find Wise’s Family Pharmacy,
which Wayne Wise opened four years ago after the chain in town had bought out the local independent competition.
Wise, who has an M.B.A., in addition to his Pharm.D., wasn’t deterred. He opened up right across the street from the chain store. “My plan was to use customer service to build relationships and to get people out of the store with their prescriptions in minutes rather than hours,” he says. Well, you can imagine his consternation when he decided to switch from a simple cash register to an Emporos point-of-sale (POS) system about three years ago and found that ringing customers up actually took a little longer than before.
But Wise put his businessman’s mind to the problem and quickly came to a realization: he was gaining much more in accuracy, accountability, and information than what he was giving up in speed. While Wise was mainly looking at POS in order to add e-signature capture and eliminate paper logs, he has put his Emporos POS to work doing so much more and, at the same time, has found out just what his old cash register wasn’t doing.
So Many Signatures
First of all, e-signature capture has proven to be just as big a success as Wise had hoped. His cashier now collects signatures for prescription pickup, credit and debit cards, and receipt of HIPAA privacy notice, simply by following the prompts from the system. Wise is even ready to comply with South Carolina’s forthcoming law requiring signatures for pseudoephedrine sales.
As a side note, Wise points out, Emporos goes beyond simply prompting for a signature whenever an item with pseudoephedrine is scanned; it will even let him scan he bar code on the back of a South Carolina driver’s license in order to populate the pseudoephedrine report that the state will require. Wise would love to be able to use this feature for streamlining his controlled-substances reporting in general in order to get one more piece of paperwork out of his store.
But back to all these e-signatures he’s capturing. They create a tremendous amount of accountability, according to Wise, and save a great deal of time later on. For instance, it’s easy now to retrieve and print out a log for any period that shows who picked up which prescriptions — handy both for inquiring customers and in case of a third-party audit. With credit and debit cards, he’s got easy access in case of alleged fraud. Wise has also streamlined his HIPAA signature collection process by taking advantage of the full integration between his Emporos POS and TransactionData Rx30 pharmacy management system to flag patient files when these signatures are collected at the front end.
Integration also means that whenever he needs to print out signature logs or other information from his POS, he can do so right to his network laser printer. This may sound like a little thing, but Wise appreciates that it means he’s using his lowest-cost printer.
Empowering the Front End
POS has also improved customer service through a bar-coded will-call management feature. When the cashier scans a prescription, all other prescriptions associated with the same patient come up as well. “This prevents complaints from customers who would have to drive back to get a prescription and it gives our cashier a positive responsibility for making sure every prescription that’s ready for a customer is picked up,” says Wise.
The ability that POS gives Wise’s cashier to take an active role in will-call bin management also extends to another important aspect of the business: managing house charge accounts. First, the POS lets the cashier see an out-standing charge balance while the customer is still at the register. It is much easier, in Wise’s opinion, to discuss money owed face to face rather than over the phone.
Another benefit is that Wise has been able to move his OTC charges away from a system that put stickers on paper and then required staff to key the information into the Rx30 to one that is bar-code driven and run at the POS. The old system definitely allowed for mistakes that let revenue go out the door. “Overall, we’ve improved our workflow by focusing these tasks at the register rather than bringing them back to the pharmacy,” says Wise. At the same time, full integration means that the pharmacy is readily aware of what’s going on at the front end.
Keeping an Eye on Things
As a store owner, Wise truly appreciates all of the information that POS provides him about what’s going on at the front end. This ranges from help tracking inventory to reducing the work needed to handle accounting issues, and comes in the form of the reports Wise generates from the POS database.
In particular, Wise’s M.B.A. has helped him realize that, with third parties taking control of the prescription business, the only thing that you can do to control your costs is to manage your inventory and your payroll. POS offers precise insights into inventory, likely the larger of the two in most pharmacies. Specifically, Wise uses a sales snap-shot to check on his biggest OTC movers daily, as well as his sales volume for other categories such as DME, gifts, and greeting cards. This report has served up a few surprises, such as the fact that candy follows only prescriptions in the ranking of contributors to daily transaction volume.
More importantly, Wise has also used these reports to discover that his DME business is strong and that he sells a lot of vitamins, even though for a long time this was a small department and spread out around the store. This is hard data that Wise took action on to grow with purpose when he remodeled recently, giving vitamins a big position in the front aisle and expanding his DME department. “If you are watching the register every day you can get a feel for what’s being sold,” says Wise.
And while the demands of running a pharmacy mean that he can’t literally keep an eye on the register all the time, robust reporting lets him know exactly what’s happening. “I used to work for a big chain,” points out Wise, “and these sales reports were exactly what we were using there to stay informed.”
Then there’s the sales tax report, which simplifies the task of tracking and reporting both state and county sales tax each month. Wise also likes the end-of year sales report he generates for his accountant. This task has gone from taking hours to add up the monthly receipts he’d saved, to the simplicity of running a single report.
Creating Accountability
Reporting also lets Wise take advantage of the pass-word that every employee has, with customizable system access levels. When Wise needs to review transactions for a certain period, each one is tied to the staffer who executed it. If a return is made or a discount given, Wise knows who authorized it. In the rare cases when a customer has a complaint, he knows who was at the register.
For example, when Wise first got the POS, a customer left without all her prescriptions. Wise wanted to know what had happened, particularly because his new technology was supposed to pre-vent this very situation. The employee code on the transaction meant it was a simple matter to find out who to talk to in order to learn from the event. “POS has given us a lot more control over our front end,” says Wise, “which is such an important face of our business.”
POS for Growth
Wise has come a long way with POS, making a real commitment to using this technology to improve his store and the quality of service his staff provides to his customers. Based on the benefits he’s seen, Wise is frank in assessing the value of POS for his independent colleagues. “If you are happy with the way you are doing things now, then stay with it,” says Wise. “But if you are looking to grow, to create accountability, to remove paper — signature logs in particular — and if you want to know exactly what people are buying and how much they are spending, then POS is going to help.”
Will Lockwood is VP and senior editor at ComputerTalk . He can be reached at will@computertalk.com
