Management
• The most common ratio used to determine how well a pharmacy is
managing its inventory is the inventory turnover rate (ITOR).
• This means that this pharmacy, on average, sells all the inventory that
is typically kept in the pharmacy a total of 10 times over the course of
a year.
• Note that if the COGS remained constant for the year and the average
inventory increased, the ITOR would have decreased. This would have
indicated that inventory was sitting on the shelf and not selling.
• The pharmacy manager then would want to determine if she was
ordering too much product or the wrong products.
• Overall, pharmacy managers need to make sure that the ITOR is not
too high. This may indicate that out-of-stocks may be occurring too
frequently.
• Alternatively,if the ITOR is too low, then the pharmacy may be
carrying too much inventory that is not salable or not being used.
• Hence cash is being spent to purchase the product,but cash is not
flowing in from the sale of the product. Deciding what is too high or
too low is pharmacy-dependent.
• The pharmacy manager should consider national or regional
benchmarks as well as the pharmacy’s trends when interpreting the
ITOR.
• The ITOR is one indicator that should be considered when managing
inventory, but it must be interpreted given the context of the
pharmacy.
• For example, an ITOR of 30 may be acceptable if the pharmacy can
order and receive items quickly from the vendor and there have not
been complaints of shortages. It maybe more helpful for the
pharmacy manager to look at the ITOR within product lines or
departments to facilitate decision making.
• Another indicator of a pharmacy manager’s ability to manage the
investment in inventory efficiently is the net-profit-to-average-
inventory ratio.
• Pharmacy managers should monitor products closely that qualify for the
various returned-goods policies, making certain that such returns are made
on a regular, periodic basis before time limitations take effect.
• Management of unclaimed prescriptions. Approximately 1.5 percent
of all prescriptions received and/or filled in community pharmacies
remain unclaimed (McCaffrey et al., 1998).