Struggles in the pharmacy

Sorry, it´s been awhile. I´m still alive for those of you who are wondering, those tortuga eggs didn´t kill me and I´m not sick and I´ve had them with vegetable juice almost every morning for two weeks straight. :) I´m going to focus on one topic here since I´m behind so you can understand the whole story.

I was a bit frustrated after the first week, because we had to go back to the farmacia to help with pricing issues and it seemed like she didn´t know what she was doing. The farmacia needs to mark up all their products 35% higher than their supplier cost. This is profit is her salary. We had to change all the prices in the farmacia because the supplier prices had changed many times, and they hadn´t updated the prices ever (the farmacia has been open a year now)! And afterwards, many products were not at 35%. Some were still way higher and some way lower. I was pretty frustrated, so I sent some of you guys an email complaining about this crap. I went back on Wednesday by myself and we changed the prices again. Since I had her to myself, and I knew what pains we went through with inventory and pricing, I played asesor (consultant) and trained her with different business processes she should put into place.

1) During inventory, we counted everything on the shelves. In addition to what´s on the shelves, she has a bunch of stuff in boxes that won´t fit on the shelf. We spent a lot of time counting this stuff when we counted inventory at the end of July. I asked her, why can´t we count it at one time, and put a nice chart on each box with a list of each medicine, count, and expiration date. Anytime she needs to pull anything out, just add a line to the chart stating the new amount of each medicine in the box. She seemed to like that idea. This leads to the next thing we discussed.

2) At the beginning of the month, why can´t she continue this process at the beginning of each month. She has to count the stuff to confirm everything from her order is there anyways. She seemed to like that idea too.

3) The medicine in the pharmacy is cheap because it doesn´t come in any fancy boxes. Many come in plastic jars, blisters of 10 or 20 tablets, etc. The last time we counted inventory, they were calculating the number of pills each and every time. No wonder it took us two days! With her help, we added a column to the spreadsheet with the number of pills that come in each unit that the public would buy (blister).

4) She actually suggested this one - rubber bands. There are many times when there is no movement in the pharmacy. She can use this time to group the blisters together in groups of 10 or so (to make counting easier at the end of the month).

5) Counting inventory a few days before the end of the month. PROAM takes 3 days normally to process an order, so why not count inventory and send in the order at least 3 days before the end of the month in order to get the new products on day one, and change any prices before the month starts.

Anyways, I felt better after changing prices with her and discussing these things to make her job easier. Now, what really happened.

1) I came back to help her count the boxes before a few days before we were planning to count inventory. She was lazy and didn´t feel like putting the expiration dates. She didn´t feel the chart, and wanted to just write on masking tape. I guess this is one reason why volunteers are volunteers for two years.

2) She didn´t place the order after inventory. Instead just a week ago. We just got the shipment Thursday, and Friday we had an all day meeting, so saber if she put the masking tape on the boxes. I´ll check up on her later this week.

3) I´ve changed all the medicines that have different unit quantities. For those that come in both, they are listed twice on the inventory sheet.

4) We (the coop) bought her rubber bands. Let´s wait and see what happens.

5) Good news! We counted inventory at the end of August. Instead of two days, it only took us 5 hours! Unfortunately, many volunteers do not get to see results this quickly. I guess I was pretty lucky. :)

This month I´ll follow up on these items, and also help her create simple addressing so we can order the items by location on the shelves on the inventory sheet. Right now it is in alphabetical order, so we´re jumping around the pages a lot, and it´s hard to keep track of where we are at when doing inventory.

Well that´s all for this post.