Case: Pharmacy Service Improvement at CVS
INTRODUCTION
Consumer Value Store (CVS) opened in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1963. The company was one of America’s largest retail drugstores and had 4,000 stores and revenue of $24.2 billion by 2002. Generally, a company that serves pharmacy service must emphasize customer’s satisfaction, customer’s safety, and process efficiency. The purpose of CVS is to satisfy consumer’s needs, guarantee the accuracy of filling prescription and the health of customers, and improve the existing pharmacy fulfillment process. Anything that hampers customer’s satisfaction and process efficiency will be the major problem for CVS. The Pharmacy Service Initiative (PSI) of CVS is to find any problems for the existing pharmacy fulfillment process, so that it helps the company to achieve its organizational goals especially including the increase of customer’s satisfaction and the improvement of process efficiency. Consequently, CVS should analyze the existing pharmacy fulfillment process, and then search any existing process problems. Any possible solutions, recommendations, and IT supports will be created after understanding those existing pharmacy fulfillment process problems.
SUMMARY of THE EXISTING PHARMACY FULFILLMENT PROCESS at CVS
The existing pharmacy fulfillment process of CVS consists of five basic steps, including drop-off, data entry, production, quality assurance, and pick-up.
Drop-off is a stage where customers leave their scripts as written by doctors in pharmacy (McAfee, 2006). A tech will ask the requested pickup time when customers drop off their scripts, and then the tech will put the script in a box that is separated different slots such as 2pm, 3pm, 4pm (McAfee, 2006). If customers want to obtain the prescription immediately, the tech will