Holy Fuck up, Batman!!
One of the positive things I can say about my company, is when they are having computer issues, they communicate to us at store level about it. Frequently. We get half a dozen faxes a day saying “your computer is going to do blahblahblah, and this is how you fix it”.
Recently there was an issue with our automatically generated orders having issues making it to our supplier. The company gave us directives on how to see if the order was transmitted sucessfully… and what to do if it wasn’t. Click this, highlight that, press this, retransmit and all will be well in the world. We ( the manager and myself) went over the procedures with all staff that would be working closing shifts to ensure that all procedures would be followed if and when the order transmission was unsucessful (because of course, it always WILL be unsucessful when someone other than the two of us is working).
In any case, Sunday’s order generates, and it’s a biggie. We have 3 days’ worth of merchandise to order and the order fails. Instead of whipping out one of the multiple faxes that has been sent to us over the course of the week that the transmission failures has been happening, the pharmacist takes their own initiative to “fix” the problem. This pharmacist is a wonderful person. I love working with them, but oftentimes they are stuck in a mode that doesn’t allow change with technology. The company has provided us with the equipment to make things a lot easier when it comes to placing our orders. Aside from following the above mentioned click, press, highlight, done method mentioned above… we can also manually enter the order into the web site from our supplier. The pharmacist in question KNOWS how to use this method, as this is the way we place our orders for expensive injectibles and odd items that aren’t in the computer system, and I specifically showed them how to use this if the order failed.
Now to the fuck up part of it. Instead of following the company directives first line… or my suggestions as a back up.. what does the pharmacist do? Pulls out the Telxon, hands it to the student (who has never even SEEN a Telxon, let alone tried to used one) and highlights two rows in the generate order print out. Says to the student “punch in the item number and then the quantity.”
The student says, “so I punch in item number 123456789, and then 100?” (the pharmacist had highlighted the number of tablets.. not the number of packs required).. and the pharmacist says “yes.. that’s right”. So, being the dutiful student… the order is keyed.
item #123456789 qty 100
item #234556789 qty 120
and so on.. for over a hundred items.
The order was transmitted via telephone to the supplier… who robotoic morons that they are.. pick as transmitted. They picked 100 bottles of each medication.. and packed it up and invoiced our store for well over$500, ooo worth of drugs. Not once did anyone at the supplier pick up on the fact that a store that normally orders 10,000 ON A GOOD DAY, has ordered enough merchandise to deplete their entire stock in some items. Or if they did pick up on it, they just shrugged and packed it up because they are trained not to question anything like good little doggies.
I get to work on Monday and see a case.. full of about 3 dozen tubes of some obscure cream sitting there with a credit request and say.. “what the…” to which the manager replies “don’t even start…”
If it weren’t for our very smart driver refusing to accept a delivery of 75 cases for us (when we normally get 5 or 6) we would have been sorting and sending back all of the other thousands of items.. and paying a 15% restocking fee. YOUCH $500,000 X 15% =holymotherofgodthatsmorethanImakeinayear!!
Thankfully, it all worked out in the end, but if the driver hadn’t been so quick to refuse.. or the pharmacist would have followed clear directions.. or the drones at the supplier hadn’t been so.. dronish.. we could have saved everyone a bunch of stress and anxiety. I feel bad for the people at the supplier who had to put all that stuff back on the shelves.. and the ones who had to cancel their orders to the suppliers to replenish the stock that they didn’t really need afterall.. wait.. no I don’t..