4 Key Benefits of Improving Pharmacy Inventory Management

A pharmacy can only be as successful as its inventory. No matter the size, location, or nature of your business, no pharmacy will reach its full potential if it experiences inventory backlogs or internal mixups. While managing inventory might not seem like the most pressing problem a business leader may face, the truth is that pharmacy inventory management is key to saving money, improving customer experiences, and building a thriving organization. Here, we’ll take a look at how pharmacies can improve their inventory management and the key benefits they’ll unlock as a result:

Enhancing Inventory Management

Revamping inventory management starts with a commitment from the top. By that, we mean that inventory management needs to be a priority for pharmacy business leaders. Otherwise, it’s possible that inventory management can fall by the wayside and become disorganized. Taking a more hands-on approach, though, will allow business leaders to identify trends and understand potential pain points before they become problematic. Then you can use that knowledge to make changes as needed, not months down the road.

On a practical level, improving inventory management involves prioritizing it, and ensuring that staff members (particularly managers) take it seriously. However, manual methods of stocking, ordering, and managing inventory are limited; they can take a lot of time and prevent your team from focusing on other problems. As such, anything you can do to automate this process is crucial. For example, some key advantages that our inventory management programs provide include: 

• Automatically reorder what you’ve sold with replenishment ordering.
• Import specialty product files.
• Manage inventory counts and more with wireless handheld devices.
• Fine tune product ordering based on min/max quantities.

By enhancing the way your team manages your inventory and your orders, you’ll be able to accomplish all of the following: 

Keep the Shelves Stocked and Prices Accurate – Empty shelves are extremely detrimental to a growing pharmacy. Yet, poor inventory management can lead to the failure to replace important products. As such, it’s important for pharmacies to be able to pull items from back-stock to fill empty spaces, manage shelf space shelves, and make sure that every product gets reordered when stock gets low. What’s more, quality inventory management allows you to keep your prices in line with your labels and the figures in your POS system.

Understand Key Sales Trends – Plain and simple, the more time and energy a business leader devotes to managing inventory, the better they’ll be able to determine current sales trends. Naturally, this can then inform them how best to proceed in future, and, subsequently, generate more ROI from their orders. So constantly reviewing inventory management choices is key. 

Identify Shrinkage– Even when you’re managing ordering through your point-of-sale using a min/max or replenishment ordering process, you still need to ensure inventory figures are accurate on a regular basis. One of the biggest reasons for this is identifying inventory shrinkage. Determining how and why inventory counts have come up short can help decide if you need to monitor employees for proper checkout procedures, review order counts with your vendors, or be on the lookout for theft in certain areas of the store.

Bringing it all Together – All in all, better inventory management improves the customer experience, makes life easier for your employees, and can save a pharmacy a significant amount of money. At RMS, we specialize in providing innovative tech solutions to support pharmacies looking to upgrade their internal processes. We have the experience and the resources to help your organization, so contact us here today to learn more!