Reclaiming Profitability While Reinventing Pharmacy
What do you get when you convert a closed-door pharmacy into a decentralized fulfillment center (FC) that automates virtually everything? The ability to:
- Serve up to 200 stores — all within a two-hour radius of each other
- Realize significant cost savings through inventory consolidation
- Automate serialization and lot documentation requirements
- Facilitate touchless digital ordering and off-hours shopping of both food and pharmacy
- Enable the same courier to handle store replenishment and home deliveries
These are all great benefits. But there’s more. This hub also allows retail pharmacy to:
- Radically reinvent their business model
- Reshape employee experiences
- Reconfigure distribution for improved profitability
- Realize a better today and tomorrow for their business and the communities they serve
Enabling “next” now
How can one decentralized FC accomplish all of this? Modular automation. This is the next phase of logistics automation. With a modular approach, core logistics processes are separated and offered as individual robotics and software solutions. But! They are all designed to work together.
A “smaller-parts-of-a-whole” approach provides many benefits including:
- Seamless integration
- Incremental implementation
- Rapid reconfiguration
- Systemwide optimization
- Robotic mobilization between processes
Once deployed, this hub can continuously evolve to deliver the new services consumers desire and the frontline clinical care communities need.
Transforming pharmacy
The next step on your revolutionary and evolutionary journey? Use the same hub to support other types of pharmacies, such as Specialty Pharmacies and Long-Term Care Pharmacies.
Then, when you’re ready, add a shuttle system, picking stations and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in the back of the closed-door pharmacy. Now you can replenish fast-moving front-of-store items for all the pharmacies served by the hub. The same courier delivers it all.
Next step? Use the same shuttle system to fill eCommerce orders. The same courier now delivers:
- Pharmacy replenishment medications
- Direct delivery prescriptions
- Front-of-store items
- Grocery items
- eCommerce orders
Looking for even more value? Add labor, transportation and maintenance management software. This allows you to make more informed and timely decisions about operations by automating almost every aspect of labor management. The modular software also makes it possible to integrate transport management with shipment tracking all the way to the store. Finally, adding CMMS (computerized maintenance and management software), lets you leverage real-time insights into robotics for proactive and predictive maintenance.
Operations are faster. Insights are deeper. Decisions are smarter. Investment protection is longer.
Next, add an automated locker outside the closed-door pharmacy. Now you can provide 24/7 pickup and drive-through services for front-of-store eCommerce orders.
Finally, add an automated dispensing center inside the closed-door pharmacy and a self-service terminal outside. Now, you can provide 24/7 BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) and around-the-clock dispensing of Will-Call prescriptions and OTC medications.
You’ve just flexed your way to a brighter future.
Modular automation makes sense
It’s a powerful story. It could be your story. The hardware, software and expertise to guide you through this transformational journey is all available today. In fact, this technology shift is already happening.
- Pharmacies are using robots to dispense medications faster and with greater accuracy
- Pharmacists and technicians are providing essential frontline care
- Patients are choosing to use pharmacies that help them manage their medications and their health
