Pharmacy Service Improvement at Cvs (a)

Background – The case is about the defective fulfillment process at CVS and the subsequent poor customer service in the retail drugstores, responsible for the pharmacy members defections due to service (see exhibit 1).

Analysis – The pharmacy fulfillment process has 5 basic steps, with the following key problems:

Drop-off | > | Data entry+ DUR+ Insurance Check | > | Production | > | Quality Assurance | > | Pick-up |

1 – Drop-off: No one attending at the drop-off station.

2 – Data entry: Process only start 1 hour before the prescription’s pick-up; “No refills allowed” scripts (6% of total scripts, with resolutions from 20 minutes to 3 days); DUR (drug utilization review) hard stop (20% of total scripts, although only 2% of all scripts need to involve the prescribing doctor to resolve the possibility for harmful drug-drug interaction); Insurance check (17% of total scripts).

3 – Production: Insufficient inventory to completely fill the script (7% of the total scripts with partial or complete stock shortages).

4 – Quality Assurance: No key process problems identified.

5 – Pick-up: Scripts not found; Shortage of employees between 5pm and 7pm, when many costumers come after work to pick up their prescriptions; Unpleasant customer surprises related with previous stations, like unauthorized refills, scripts that had not been paid for by the insurance, scripts not ready due to shortage of the required medicine.

Recommendations – Based on the key problems of the pharmacy fulfillment process, I suggest the implementation of the following short (ST) and medium term (MT) solutions:

ST1 – Data Entry should start immediately after a customer dropped off a script and not only

1 hour before the pick-up. This would give more time to the staff to solve problems related with “no refill allowed”, DUR hard stop, insurance check and inventories.

ST2 – Costumers should be informed by phone calls or sms about the problems with their scripts, if any, before they...