Minfos Blog

Did you know that highly engaged teams deliver 21% greater profitability? Fact, according to a recent Gallup report.

The report also found that employees are more productive, customer-focused and compliant with business processes when they are provided with clear directions, tools and support.

Let’s take a look at some ideas on how you can effectively communicate information about your pharmacy, processes, products and services with your staff.

Conduct an internal communications audit

Reduce staff frustration by giving them quick and easy access to information they need to deliver a superior experience to customers. To find out if your staff have access to the information they need to do their job, start with an audit:

1. Compile a list of all channels you currently use to share information with your team.
2. Conduct an audit of these channels – ask your staff what is and isn’t working for them.
3. Gather ideas from your team – are there other channels or methods you could try using such as daily team huddles or adding tasks and events to the Minfos calendar?
4. When you have the list of gaps (about product, procedures, services, etc), prioritise your list and work with your staff to address these issues.

Share information regularly

Keep your staff in the loop and well engaged by:

• Building a constructive working relationship with your staff through regularly meetings.
• Ensuring information is easily accessible and easily noticeable, e.g. ensure your staff notice board is always kept up-to-date.
• Providing a weekly or monthly written summary on relevant targets they need to meet, pricing updates, promotions, advertisements, services, upcoming in-store events, etc.

Leverage your pharmacy management software

Find out what note functionalities your pharmacy management software offers.

• Use any notes functionality available in your software. For example, in Minfos you can easily add notes about individual products and customers.
• Keep your staff informed by using tools such as Minfos calendar, where all staff members can share and view notes on events and appointments.

By providing the right information and engaging your staff, you can reap the rewards of gaining a well engaged and high performing team.

If you are interested about customer communications, have a read of our article – ‘Why your pharmacy should SMS instead of phoning patients?’

Looking for tools to communicate with your staff? Minfos software enables you to manage every aspect of your pharmacy – from dispense to retail. Let us show you a demo.

All advice provided is general in nature and is not intended as legal advice.

Strategic and data-driven decision making is key to developing a high performing pharmacy’s retail team. Here are some tips on how you can get the most out of data and improve the performance of your team. 

Create a performance benchmark

As part of your overarching strategy to improve your retail sales performance, consider creating a baseline from which you can accurately measure team performance. This can be achieved by reviewing the following on a weekly or monthly basis:

• Sales achieved by each employee
• Sales by time of day
• Sales by day

Minfos provides this data in a report format for you to easily analyse.

Training for performance

The pharmacy retail environment is constantly evolving, so ensure you provide your staff with ongoing training and up-skilling opportunities. This not only helps staff perform at their optimal level, it also helps you retain highly skilled employees. To efficiently train staff, leverage your high performers to teach new staff and those who need some help to improve.

Role-play is great way to deliver training. Consider using a portion of your staff meeting for this activity. Split your team into smaller groups and give everyone a number of scenarios to role-play “What would you do in this situation?”

Effective rostering to optimise opportunity

At the end of each month, it is worth reviewing the previous years’ sales by day and time for the coming month. When you have a clear and accurate picture of the busy periods in your pharmacy, you can roster your staff accordingly. This in turn will help you deliver your best service to customers and drive sales.

Celebrate the wins

Create a culture that promotes success and make your staff feel valued. This could include:

• Team sales performance shout outs (see below for an example)
• Monthly best staff performance awards
• Professional development opportunities for star performers

Use your sales data to drive team performance

1. Set a sales benchmark to beat. For example, at the end of the month, find the previous year’s sales for the next month and increase it by a defined percentage.
2. Make it visible. Write the sales target on your staff board.
3. Treat your staff. When the team achieves the sales target, update the board with the new target and shout them a morning tea or small gift to celebrate the win.

We hope we have provided you with some useful ideas on benchmarking performance and creating a positive work culture to increase productivity and sales in your pharmacy.

Looking to easily analyse staff and pharmacy sales? Minfos software enables you to manage every aspect of your pharmacy – from dispense to retail. Let us show you a demo.

All advice provided is general in nature and is not intended as legal advice.

The journey to improving retail operations and sales is often the result of a deliberate and consistent set of activities.

We have compiled six ideas to help you amplify your retail management and sales strategy.

1. Create a high performing retail sales team
2. Effectively communicate with staff
3. Manage healthy gross profit margins
4. Run profitable promotions
5. Improve and maintain accurate inventory
6. Strategies to control your inventory

Pricing overview

Deploying the right pricing strategies within your pharmacy sets the foundation for profit and growth. Minfos offers a number of tools to help you to effortlessly manage pricing, categories and to identify areas for growth. These include:

• A single screen to quickly review and price products
• Update product pricing individually or in bulk (e.g. categories, KVI and etc)
• Efficiently conduct pricing reviews and analyse pricing strategies across categories, orders, pricing policies, gross profit percentage (GP%) and more
• Review the effect on your GP% before implementing price updates to products
• Set GP% or mark-up % performance guidelines for categories
• Choose and set products as Known Value Items (KVIs)
• Auto-round new product price (e.g. nearest 5 or 9 cents)

Automatically clear the Price Changes Report

Recently, we updated the Price Changes Report. You now have a configuration option that will clear the report automatically during the End of Day process. This helps prevent the same shelf label being printed multiple times, saving you time and eliminating the need to manually clear the report. If your store does not use the price changes report, you can use the configuration option to ensure that you are not storing unnecessary price change data.

You can find our pricing management resources in our Help Centre.

Packing overview

Accurate management of Dose Administration Aids (DAAs) is a must in a pharmacy. We make it simple with our built-in packing functionality and integration. Minfos Packing enables you to:

• Create and maintain patient profiles
• Accurately manage medication for patients with complex dosing regimes
• View drugs for all pack types
• View low or negative drug balance to identify medication needing replenishment
• Effortlessly queue scripts in dispense from Minfos Packing
• Charge to a customer's account in 1-click (applicable for Meditec and DoseAid integrations)
• Easily perform a bulk substitution when your preferred brand changes
• Customise your blister template 
• Packing runs and pack changes are recorded and can be easily accessed for future reference

We have made a number of improvements to support pharmacies that use Minfos Packing or have integrated Minfos with a Packing vendor.  These are:

• Warning prompt when ‘Pack duration exceeds shelf life of xx days’ (applicable for pharmacies using DoseAid)
• Ability to merge packed products
• Audit report for merged items

Warning prompt when ‘Pack duration exceeds shelf life of xx days’

Pharmacies using Minfos Packing for DoseAid sachets will now be alerted with a warning prompt, if the ‘Pack duration exceeds shelf life of xx days.’

Merging packed products

It is now possible for a slave product in a packing profile to be merged. We have also updated the workflow for this merge to appear in all relevant areas of the packing module, including areas such as the patient profiles, medication history and packing audit reports.

Audit report for merged items

To assist Pharmacists, we have built a product merges audit report. This report displays all merges that have occurred where the slave product was in at least one patient packing profile. The report provides visibility of the patient profiles impacted by the merge.

You can find our packing resources in our Help Centre.

Loyalty integration overview

Minfos smoothly integrates with loyalty solutions. Our loyalty integration enables pharmacies to effectively connect with their customers and build long-term customer loyalty for their business.

Recently, we have improved the Minfos workflow for the LoyaltyOne loyalty integration.

LoyaltyOne Pop-up message in Minfos Till

If there is LoyaltyOne message for a member and you scan their loyalty card, the message will pop-up in Minfos Till . This allows you to see the message, while still being able to:

• Scan products
• View the sales basket

This change gives you more visibility and a seamless loyalty workflow experience in Minfos.

You can find our Loyalty resources in our Help Centre.

Robotics dispense integration overview

Minfos seamlessly integrates with a number of robotic dispense systems. Hand-in-hand with your robotics system, Minfos helps you effectively manage stock levels. 

Drug Recall window shows robot stock-on-hand (SOH)

Recently, we added a new column ‘ROB SOH’ to the Drug Recall window. This new feature enables pharmacies using a robotic dispensing system to view both the SOH of a product held in the robot and the total SOH in their pharmacy.

You can find our robotics resources in our Help Centre.

Ordering overview

Controlling your stock levels and making data-driven purchasing decisions is critical to the success of your pharmacy. Minfos make ordering fast and easy. Our features include:

• Electronic ordering
• Auto-generating orders
• Create an order based on a date range
• Create an order based on seasonal ordering
• Set ordering to ensure you order the right quantity
• Set minimum order quantities or order multiples for manual orders
• Easily manage stock transfers
• Email orders to suppliers
• Review current and last invoice costs

Throughout the year, we have made improvements to ordering, including:

• Order Edit screen improvements
• Prompt when an order is open in another workstation
• Improved Minfos multi-store search and sort functionality in SOH tab

Order Edit screen improvements

We have increased the screen size and added sales and purchase information to the screen. This means that when you open any order, the units sold and purchased are located at the bottom of the order screen. This helps you to keep your profit position top of mind.

In the Order Edit screen, you will now also find the monthly sales and purchases for the selected product. This enables you to make quick ordering decisions based on previous sales and purchases, without leaving the screen.

Prompt when an order is open in another workstation

If another pharmacy staff attempts to open an order that is already open on another workstation, a notification will appear. It will include the details of the station where the order is open. We have also implemented this prompt for ePad orders. 

Improved Minfos multi-store search and sort functionality in SOH tab

We have improved the Stock on Hand (SOH) tab in the product stock card. Now, you will be able to search and find a specific store within the list. You can also sort by the column headers.

You can find our order management resources in our Help Centre.