How do you keep your front end stocked? Is it walking the shelves every day and eyeballing what needs to be ordered? How much time does this take? And what’s the margin for error?
In short, how much are manual front-end processes costing you?
We get it - not every point-of-sale system can handle your front-end. And implementing one that is capable generally requires some upfront and ongoing investment. Quality POS systems definitely aren't free by any means, but neither are your manual processes - and they're costing you every single day in multiple ways.
Here are 4 that tip the scale against your favor the most.
Payroll Hours
Every time an employee has to walk the shelves to create an order list or parse out items from a report and create a purchase order manually, you’re spending money and losing efficiency.
Time spent on manual processes like these equates to payroll hours that could have been spent on other, more lucrative projects in your pharmacy - or ones you didn't have to pay out at all. The ideal process is to generate electronic purchase orders through a system that uses replenishment or min/max logic to create the order automatically.
We still recommend you walk the shelves regularly to keep them neat/clean and monitor for shrinkage. But with POS-based front-end management tools, processes like ordering, pricing, and inventory take a fraction of the time.
Lost Sales
Out-of-stocks have become an inescapable reality on retailer shelves over the past few years. There’s not always a viable solution when your wholesaler is backordered, but manual processes only exacerbate the profit loss from empty shelves.
All it takes to impact your stock on hand is one busy day where a team member gets pulled away to something else and can't get to every section. Or a day when you’re understaffed due to sick staff. Or... the list goes on. The point is, there are dozens of potential opportunities for your manual processes to fall through the cracks, so automating what you can through your point-of-sale is optimal.
Inaccurate Pricing
If your pricing and receiving processes are still linked, and you’re still using item stickers instead of shelf labels, the door is wide open for pricing discrepancies to occur. Item pricing that doesn't match system pricing can be another avenue for lost profits, such as when an item's suggested retail price increases but the sticker price doesn’t get updated. (Not to mention the time wasted if you’re touching products again, and again, and again...)
Managing price updates through your point-of-sale with POS-generated shelf labels helps to keep things accurate and saves an immense amount of time. When a bulk price update comes through, the system prints labels for only the products you carry. You then can choose when the price changes go into effect to allow plenty of time for getting new labels on the shelf.
Garbage Data
Perhaps the least obvious (but potentially highest) cost of manual front-end processes is that your data means nothing. Either because it doesn’t exist in a way that’s accessible, or because there’s no thorough, accurate information feeding in.
Without the right data, many of your business decisions will be left to guesswork. Sometimes that may pan out, but often it results in lost opportunities. Whether it's something simple like product movement, or something more in depth like your Gross Margin Return on Investment, the data that’s in your point-of-sale system is always going to tell the most complete story.
Feel like you might be losing money for one of these reasons? We can help. Schedule your complimentary consultation today.
