presentation
ricyru
managementskillsprojectt6_1.docx
Management Skills Project T6
Team 9
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Team Members |
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Xiaolin Bian | |
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Krishna Patel | |
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Rui Qi | |
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Saeid Bayoumi |
Table of Contents
Background Information
Output problem
Data collection methods
Integration with Course Content
Recommendations
Analysis
Background Information
CVS is the largest retail pharmacy and health care provider in the United States. With nearly 50 years of development, CVS pharmacy has become one of the most well-known medical and pharmaceutical companies in the United States, with the largest pharmaceutical benefit management company in the United States and the second largest retail pharmacy in the United States.
As the United States is a strict separation of medicine, therefore, there are no pharmacy in the hospital, all the patients need to go to the pharmacy to buy drugs, and CVS do is "medicine" this part of the business. As the largest retail drugstore in the US, CVS pharmacy is no stranger to Americans. Big to the hospital out of the prescription drugs, small to food and daily necessities, the CVS pharmacy provided complete goods and services. Unlike other pharmacies, you can also see the doctor, consult a professional medical staff, vaccination, etc..The CVS pharmacy usually located near open areas in the community, which is more convenient to people's living needs.
CVS pharmacy has two major business segments, one is pharmaceutical services, its essence is the Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) and management of pharmaceutical welfare and related business; the second is the retail pharmacy services, including offline and online retail pharmacies and health center clinics. The two main business of the main difference is that the pharmaceutical service is to do the agency, by the management fee agreement to make money; while the drugstore is mainly selling drugs, rely on sales to make profits. However, in recent years, the two become larger, such as PBM is also doing drug delivery by mail, and some close to the retail pharmacies. CVS pharmacy provides PBM services to help insurers and Fortune 500 companies to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical and drug stores, while the insured people can go to a CVS retail pharmacy or take a prescription drug by mail. CVS offers PBM services and retail Pharmacy two content, but the two parts of the business is not independent, even signed other companies' PBM services, the insured can also take drugs at the CVS pharmacy, the scope of specific drug according to the contract be provided. The one competitors of CVS is PBM, it affects the entire industry chain. PBM has a strong control of the pharmaceutical factory, and its scale is determined by the number of contractions, if the PBM loss of customers, it will directly affect the profits of CVS.
CVS pharmacy’s direct competitors can be divided into three categories. The first is PBM other business cooperation, such as ESI and Medco, these two companies as the largest PBM partners, they discuss the merger recently. Once they successfully merged into one firm, it will become a major threat to CVS pharmacy. In addition, other large health insurers and retailers, such as Healthcare and Wal-mart, may also pose a threat to CVS. Besides that, there are some local companies may offering similar services but they know their audience better than CVS pharmacy. In general, the most important issue is actually CVS internal problems, each store has its own specific problems. In our project, We are fortunate to have a member who working at CVS pharmacy located at 100 14th street, Jersey city, New Jersey. He provides some useful data from his store.
In our local CVS pharmacy, we used the form of a questionnaire to study the general staff, and short interviews to collect the views of managers. Based on our collection, there are 4 lead technicians and two full time pharmacists. It is worth mentioning that, according to our database, the average age of employees concentrated around 25-year-old, while managers’ age are over 40 years of age.
Output Problems
A problem that CVS is facing is time efficiency, they don’t have enough personnel to help them get the medicine faster to the customers. Compared to the CVS competitors the customers have a longer wait time. Which results in declining of customer satisfaction, and it would benefit its’ competitors. The obvious way we see the problem in store is that, the customers express their feelings about the the long waits. Managers describe this problem as reduced profit due to less production of drugs. Employees describe this problem as less opportunities available to them, extra hours, hard working conditions because of more work that needs to be done, less leisure time available. The managers do see this as a problem however they don’t have the resources they need to succeed. The managers know the bigger pictures and try to explaining it to their employees. The employees tend to blame their managers because they don't know the situation and how they have to work more hours and pick up slack.
Data collection methods
In order to solve the time efficiency problem, our member Saeid Bayoumi as a representative had interviews with his manager and colleagues. The motive to interview both manager and employees were to gain a well-rounded understanding of the issue and where the problem arises. In addition, we also designed an evaluation survey to all the employers to collect more information about their attitudes and opinions with the working environment. The reason for designed this survey is our team want to obtain more comprehensive feedback from all the employees.
During our interview with the manager and employees, we found that the manager is worried about the whole tight budgets and not even noticed that his employees are not satisfied with their management. And according to the data collected from surveys, 70% of employees are not like their working environment, about half of them think that working time even “does not make any sense”. Face to such problems, the manager said he didn’t know it so serious.
Integration with Course Content
The most likely to be helpful for our team in analyzing the output problem, would be motivation on the employee's side meaning finding out what incentives are employees most likely to respond to when it comes to surveys. Another thing that CVS can implement to the its employee is work design Where it can designate different job task to each of their employees to work efficiently. In addition to the work design if the managers could be a leader and take steps to motivate its employees to work harder and efficient it can minimize the problems. Additionally, the employees can communicate their problems that face on a daily basis to the supervisors so they can facilitate to their needs. Furthermore, if the manager forecast how many employee they’re going to need would help them tremendously. During the fall and winter season where the cold is normal thing having help would make the wait shorter.
Recommendations
Innovation-- Employees can be given the opportunity to bring in and experiment with new ideas in order to enhance efficiency. Employees should be able to give some feedback to the managers, so the managers can come up with solutions to the concerns that they face.
Competition-- understanding the skill set or the most profitable skill of your competitor will help to make your firm target your goals better. Also knowing how fast the competitions gets the prescription and fills the medicine would help to set an example to exceed their time. They can also use a weekly motivation session, where the managers let them know that they’re doing well and give them some pep talks so they have a clear focus on what needs to get done. Understanding how long it takes for their competition to take an order and deliver the medicine would be beneficial because it would give the employees an incentive to perform above.
In the peak reception and alighting of the additional staff-- many of the problems identified by the staff as well as many of the customer complaints can be increased by additional staffing for peak periods of decline (eg, from 7am to 10am on weekdays) and peak Pick-up times (eg weekdays from 5pm to 7pm). While we are aware of CVS's difficulties with staffing in the past, we believe that combining more staffing with the process improvements discussed below will change the dynamics of the work environment and emphasize that management is committed to providing security , Customer-friendly pharmacy shopping experience.
Analysis
One of the main reason they are lacking personnel is because they don’t have a big enough budget to satisfy their needs. The amount of time that it takes for the customers to get their medicine after giving their prescription is substantial. None of the customers wanted to wait longer than they have to. It isn’t beneficial for CVS to have a longer wait time than its competitors, it would lead for the customers to leave CVS and go to another pharmacy. The organizational strength of CVS is in their business integrity and concern. Their principles provide the foundation for their strengths and their business growth. It is the company to achieve a higher limit of motivation. With integrity, caring, fresh ideas and new perspectives, it is important to have diversity in the workforce. It helps drive innovation at CVS Caremark and allows CVS to provide a broader range of ideas and advice on how CVS Caremark can provide a simpler experience for patients and customers.
This CVS store’s organizational weakness for their tight budget is their inventory. CVS constantly changes the available generic drug manufacturers on the market. Inventory can not meet the needs of patients, but only to meet the cost of dollars. Patients and customers are often frustrated by the changing nature of their generic drugs. Many of these patients rely on the shape and color of their pills to help them identify what they are and how they are taken away. When making changes, though they are told, they sometimes get confused. This is a weakness because more patients are frustrated with these changes, and the more dissatisfied customers are, the lower the volume of scripts. This changes the customer's perception of the type of customer service CVS needs to keep these manufacturing changes to a minimum in order to satisfy the customer and satisfy the service they receive. Customer satisfaction is the key to profitability.
In addition, if this CVS store can seize the opportunity to improve their business, they maybe have chance to get more budget. Opportunity is to provide more service to the customers and patients. Often time patient finds that they are hurried or rushed along, because the store or pharmacy is understaffed. With only a few people that is on the floor on any given day, help is scarcely dispersed on the floor to help the customers. This is a great area for improvement, not only will it drive customers to come back into the store to spend more, it will also change the views of customers about CVS. Customers come back when they feel like they were treated delightfully and that the people were helpful.
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