Navigation

Pharmacy Technician Salary

Since last spring, thousands of former Eckerd employees from Florida to Texas have undergone a crash course in all things CVS. With a speed and urgency rarely seen among even the most advanced and best-run drug chains, CVS has staged a blitzkrieg campaign to overhaul every aspect of Eckerd's pharmacy and front-end operations, information and purchasing systems, replenishment procedures, store-level execution and field management structure.

'Driving the rapid overhaul: a clear acknowledgement from company leaders that CVS must move quickly to regain lost momentum in Eckerd's core markets. "Our goal is not just to win back the customers Eckerd lost," said Jon Roberts, senior vice president of store operations. "Our goal is to grow the business."

As head of both pharmacy and front-end store-support services, pharmacy, technology and pharmacy clinical programs, Roberts also is involved with the ongoing coordination of pharmacy and front end within all CVS stores. In Roberts' words, that means "coordinating with all the departments internally [at headquarters] to build programs that ultimately touch the store."

That means a sea change for the former Eckerd organization, which had the pharmacy supervisor and a front-end supervisor both reporting to the store manager. Under CVS and Roberts, the pharmacy gains in prominence at store level, and district managers play a more crucial role in coordinating front-end and pharmacy operations.

"In terms of our field organization, the pharmacy and the front store ... come together at the district manager level, where the DM has responsibility for the whole store," Roberts explained. "And we do that because when a customer comes in our store, they view it as one store; they don't view the front and the pharmacy separately."

That unified management approach "stays together up through the regional manager and the area vice president," he added.

Until Roberts became senior vice president of store operations in 2002, CVS was organized internally with "a separate front-store and pharmacy organization at the store support center, so we weren't leveraging some of the synergies we could have," he said. "So when I came in, we brought the front and pharmacy together from a store operations perspective and a store technology perspective."

At the time of the buyout, said Roberts, "We had more than 40 meetings where we went on the road and met with field management, managers, pharmacists, some crew members. It was an introduction to CVS: who we are, what we stand for, what our mission, vision and values are and what they could begin to expect from CVS.

"We followed that up with a second meeting in July, where we actually laid out our integration plans. So we invested a lot in communication up front so the Eckerd folks were clear not only about who we are, but what our plans were to integrate the stores," he added. "We laid out a very detailed plan."

Eckerd's former employees, Roberts asserted, liked what they were hearing. "They saw we were pharmacy-focused. They saw that we know how to run pharmacies, service the customers and grow the business. And I think they were also impressed with the level of detail we were able to present them with, even before we bought the company."

To say this message of commitment, clear sense of identity and purpose was well received by former Eckerd pharmacy personnel is an understatement. CVS is a pharmacy first. Its business is built around health and beauty, and everything else in the store--from greeting cards and seasonal to food and even photo--exists to complement its core mission as a health and beauty retailer. And to be sure, CVS merchants have built a strong offering around those important general merchandise and consumable businesses. But the sign on the building says "CVS/pharmacy," and that is the focus for the chain--not how-low-can-you-go promotions on soda and laundry detergent.

For an Eckerd pharmacist emerging from a culture that, to put it mildly, had lost touch with Jack Eckerd's vision of how a drug store should operate, the introduction to CVS' pharmacy-first approach was a breath of fresh air. A series of operational issues, poor merchandising decisions and poor technology decisions that in many ways left the latter-day Eckerd a curious amalgam of the different chains it had acquired over the years, as well as the disparate IS infrastructure that tied--or hog-tied, perhaps--them all together, conspired to undermine several aspects of its operation, particularly pharmacy.

The net effect was a vicious hit to Eckerd's top-line growth, which J.C. Penney answered by cutting costs and dropping the savings to the bottom line. That meant, among other things, taking labor out of the stores. And nobody makes more in the store than the pharmacist. Cut a shift, save one big salary, multiply that by 2,800 stores--now you're taking some serious cost out of the operation. Oh yeah, you're also, potentially, taking customers out of the store, too. In a business that is premised very much on convenience, being the drug store with the worst hours won't get you far. By February 2003, that reality had begun to show in Eckerd's numbers as pharmacy same-store sales for the chain hovered around 1,000 basis points lower than market leaders CVS and Walgreens.

Eckerd, Roberts said, was ripe for change. He described its store associates and field managers as "very proud people, very loyal to their customers and their store."

But in addition to the fact that it reduced hours and cut shifts, Eckerd faced another significant challenge to pharmacy service: All that time in limbo while Penney shopped the deal around, Eckerd pharmacists, rightfully worried about the future, became susceptible to the recruiting efforts of Eckerd's chief competitors in Florida and Texas.

"They had been publicly for sale for over a year, and that had brought a lot of uncertainty" to the employees and managers, Roberts said. "And they had seen the deterioration of their business. Pharmacists had lost good customers they had serviced over the years, and that was reflected in their sales numbers. [There was] a genuine excitement among the Eckerd people about what they thought CVS could bring to them ... to win back their customers and bring in new customers."

What CVS brings to Eckerd, beyond a clarity of purpose around being the easiest pharmacy in America, are the tools to do the job. CVS has built a core competency in pharmacy efficiency, driven by its Excellence in Pharmacy Innovation and Care work-flow system, Pharmacy Service Initiative and AIM-Rx, the pharmacy edition of the Assisted Inventory Management system that helps CVS tailor assortments and, generally, make its inventory more productive.

The integration process has moved well into the next phase, Roberts said. "What they're seeing now is that we're actually executing the plan--we're doing what we said we were going to do. And from my perspective, the integration is going extremely well.

"If you look at the level of change we're asking people to go through ... in the pharmacy, with new systems, new processes to fill prescriptions that are much more organized and efficient and that deliver a much higher level of service than they were capable of in the past," it is a lot to take in, Roberts explained.

The changes at Eckerd also have included a new replenishment system for both the pharmacy and front end: CVS' AIM system. Coming from a company with a one size-fits-all inventory allocation philosophy and the technological resources to support it, the ability to put the right product in the right stores in the right amount is a major step forward for Eckerd. Both in pharmacy and on the front end, the stores had developed quite a reputation for out-of-stocks.

To prepare Eckerd's pharmacists to adapt to the new automation and work-flow systems, he said, CVS provided three levels of training, including classroom and on-site work with the systems, assisted by trainers in the store during the week each store underwent conversion. During that same week of conversion, Roberts went on, the pharmacies also inventoried all stock, implemented CVS' AIM system, underwent a technician training program and converted to new point-of-sale registers at the prescription counter. "They essentially went from being an Eckerd to being a CVS overnight," he said, "at a pace of 80 stores a week."

Executive Vice President of Stores Larry Merlo acknowledged the heavy task assigned to Eckerd's pharmacy staff during the transition. "Not only were they learning a new system, but we were also rolling out PSI, which is a new work flow for them."

To learn the new systems, "We had a couple hundred teams of trainers on the road [in Florida], half for the pharmacy and half for the front end" of the store, Roberts said. As might be expected, he added, the logistics of such a tightly coordinated enterprise were daunting, particularly because the goal was to convert each store's pharmacy and front end simultaneously to make the transition as quick and seamless as possible.

The pharmacy training teams included both an experienced CVS pharmacist and a CVS technician to shepherd every Eckerd pharmacy through the conversion process. "In most stores, they spent a week, and in the higher-volume stores, they were actually there for two weeks," Roberts explained.

For the former Eckerd pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who have made the transition, CVS' pharmacy system offers clear advantages over what they were used to. "The uniqueness about our pharmacy compared to the Eckerd system," explained Brian Bosnic, area vice president for Florida, "is that we can look up and transfer prescriptions from store to store. Eckerd had a very difficult time doing that."

Indeed, the only way an Eckerd pharmacist could use the old system to access a patient's records if that patient came from another store was to know specifically which store that patient came from. Otherwise, Eckerd's pharmacy systems didn't really allow the stores to communicate with one another. By contrast, Bosnic said, "In the CVS world, all you do is put a name or phone number in, no matter what CVS you're shopping in across the country, and that patient's records come up."

Bosnic said that capability is a powerful advantage in markets like Florida, which draws tens of thousands of "snowbirds" each year from CVS markets in the North. Being able to access those customers' records immediately eases the process of getting needed medicines far from home.

Roberts said every aspect of the integration is being measured in terms of how it impacts store sales, customer and employee satisfaction and overall performance at the store level. "We have metrics on everything," he said. "We know exactly how service at the pharmacy and front is going at every store, and we're very pleased with the initial results. And more important, we're seeing improvement every week, and we think that very rapidly these stores are going to be up and delivering the level of service we have at CVS. And that is going to be a competitive advantage for us."

Roberts said his optimism also is based on fundamental market factors like store location. "These stores are in great growth areas in Florida, with great demographics," he said.

Indeed, Florida and Texas both have a high concentration of strong prescription drug customers. The percentage of the population younger than 5 or older than 65--the biggest users of prescription drugs--in Florida is more than 23 percent, the largest of any of CVS' leading pharmacy markets. In Texas, 18 percent of the state falls into that group. And of CVS' top markets, Florida and Texas are growing the fastest, with compound annual growth rates of 1.9 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.

Also boosting CVS' outlook in Florida and Texas, Roberts said, is the company's campaign to add more 24-hour stores--and to extend operating hours for the stores.

Besides its work-flow and systems overhaul, CVS also has added pharmacy staff to improve service and accommodate what it hopes will be higher prescription counts.

Behind-the-scenes changes make tangible difference

In ways that are all but invisible to customers and in ways that are obvious from the second they walk in the door, CVS is staging a dramatic conversion of the 1,200-plus Eckerd stores it purchased from J.C. Penney. The result, said company brass, will be a rejuvenated store base whose sales, customer service levels and shopping experience eventually will mirror that of the company's core CVS stores.

The most striking changes are occurring at the front end of the stores, where teams of CVS merchandisers and store construction people are changing everything from the inventory mix and product adjacencies to store decor and signage. But behind the scenes, the back of the stores already have undergone a sweeping makeover that pharmacy leaders say will improve patient service levels and job satisfaction among pharmacists and technicians vastly.

"We have not made any physical modifications to the pharmacy in terms of what the customer will see," said Larry Merlo, executive vice president of stores. "We've made a lot of work-flow changes back in the pharmacy--things like moving where the printer is and improving the functionality of the counter space. As a result, I think we've made the pharmacy more efficient and productive."

Those changes are based on plenty of consumer research--and on measurable results, Merlo added, "When we'd talk to a group of Eckerd pharmacy supervisors about our priorities, we showed them the things we measured around customer service and how we got there. It's not what we think; it's what the customers have told us is most important in terms of why they choose their pharmacy. It's things like wait times and in-stocks [and] the courteous and friendly pharmacist."

Equally important, CVS had to convince those pharmacists that higher levels of customer service could be achieved, even in high-volume pharmacies doing 3,000 to 4,000 prescriptions per week. To do that, Jon Roberts, senior vice president of store operations brought Eckerd's pharmacy supervisors into CVS headquarters in Woonsocket, R.I., for a week. "We did a day and a half in the office, showing them how the [pharmacy] systems work and what our thought processes were. And then we had each of them go out and work in a very high-volume store. There were about 30 of them, and every person was assigned to a store. They spent about two and a half days in the stores, and then they came back here for a debriefing.

"They just hadn't experienced that," Merlo added. "It's how the work-flow process supports the system and vice versa. And it gave them the conviction, as they talked with their own pharmacists and techs, that even a store doing 4,000 scripts could achieve that."

While most of the changes in pharmacy occurred behind the counter in terms of work flow and enhanced productivity, there was one obvious pharmacy-related change to the store: a much easier pathway from the front of the store back to the pharmacy. A curving walkway from the front door to the pharmacy counter cuts a path right through the center of the store. In addition, lower gondola heights mean clearer, more unobstructed sight lines, giving the pharmacy department added prominence.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group