Proposal for Inventory System Essay

In today’s global world, access to basic and quality healthcare is crucial and imperative in order to have a good and healthy life. In view of this, access to quality and affordable drugs is a basic raw material in enhancing good and quality healthcare. It is therefore necessary and important to ensure that patients can easily get access to quality, un-expired and affordable drugs for the treatment of their diseases and sicknesses. Most importantly the efficiency with which these services are carried out can go a long way to save lives and improve upon the health status of individuals. Medisol Pharmaceutical Company Limited is a private retail pharmaceutical company established in Ghana and their main focus is to regularly sell pharmaceuticals, skin care products, baby care products and cosmetics to its customers. The company makes continuous efforts to maximize client’s satisfaction by providing good customer service and also segmenting their market so as to enable customers have easy access to their sales outlets. The company has its head office at Kanda and two other branches at west legon and kasowa respectively with their main target groups being the general public. Medisol Pharmaceutical Company ltd. has two major departments namely the Finance/Administrative Department and the Retail Department which are directly under the supervision of the CEO. The company has numerical staff strength of five (5) comprising of a CEO, a superintendent pharmacist, pharmacist, an accountant and a medicine counter assistant. Below is an organogram of Medisol Pharmaceutical company ltd. The Finance/Administrative department which is headed by the accountant handles mainly the financial and administrative tasks of the company. The company’s Retail Department serves as a liaison between Medisol and its customers and is headed by the Medicine Counter Assistant. The main responsibilities of this department are to manage the retail stock, sell items to customers and submit weekly reports to the CEO. Medisol’s operations are solely manual; as our team got to the company we were privileged to speak to the head of the retail department who explained thoroughly to us how the manual process takes place. The process starts with stock purchase where the medicine counter assistant makes a list of all needed items to be bought. This list is sent to their wholesalers for delivery of the items. Upon delivery, the items are crossed checked with the order list made and a sales invoice is then given to Medisol which is then filed in a purchasing file. Items to be sold are arranged on shelves with price tags on each item. Details of items sold are recorded in a sales book. Retail stocks are taken three times in a month and the process used is as follows; -Drugs on the shelves are counted and the quantity is crossed checked with the sales invoice kept in the purchase file(which shows quantity of items bought ), this is done to know the quantity of items sold -The quantity of sold items is then crossed checked from the sales books to further check if the items were really sold, expired or stolen. This process helps them to know how much items have been sold, how much stock is left and also determine whether to make an order or not. Medisol also has a special way of identifying expired drugs so that they won’t be sold to customers, with this the medicine counter assistant prepares a manual list of drugs whose expiry date falls within a particular year hence every six months this list is checked for drugs which have their expiry dates closer or already expired. Those almost about to expire are sold faster while those already expired are cleared from the shelves and discarded. In today’s world it is impossible to compete in the job market without a working knowledge of IT. It is therefore imperative that Medisol Pharmaceutical Company Limited implement and invest into good inventory control management system that have the ability to track, report and replenish stock. This will then improve accuracy and enhance safety and efficiency thereby helping the resale department decrease stock errors. This solution is intended to help the department to manage all transactions of received stocks, price, quantity and invoice. Security of this system will be enhanced, making it impossible for items to be misplaced or stolen. The benefits of the computerized inventory control system to Medisol Pharmaceutical Company ltd. is to make inventory decisions that minimize the total cost of inventory, which is distinctly different from minimizing inventory. It is often more expensive to run out of an item (and thus be forced to obtain it through more expensive channels) than simply to keep more units in stock. Several models have been proposed in the literature for minimizing the total cost of inventory through the use of an economic order quantity, which attempts to balance the carrying costs of inventory with the cost of running out of an item. Most pharmacy inventory decisions involve replenishment–how much to order, when to decide to order, and when to place the order.