An interview with owner/pharmacist Brent Foster

ECRS: Tell us about the history of Greever's Pharmacy.

Foster: Greever's has been in business for the past 100 years. My father bought the business from the Greever family in the mid 1960s, at which time he relocated the business to its current location. I started working summers when I was fourteen years old, and am now the owner and head pharmacist.

ECRS: What sort of customer base do you serve?

Foster: Greever's serves a 100-mile radius, generally speaking. Like most pharmacies, we cater to a wide range of ages. I've noticed that the 20 to 50-year-olds tend to shop wherever is most convenient for them geographically. But our elderly clientele have very much made Greever's their home, primarily because of the individual assistance we provide to them.

ECRS: How has your business changed over the years?

Foster: Although we've had a retail section for many years, we never really saw much business from it until recently. We realized that because our pharmacy counter was in the corner near a main entrance, many of our customers never even walked past the retail section. So when we remodeled, we enlarged the pharmacy area and put it in the middle of the store. Ever since this change, we've watched our retail sales transform from practically nothing into a vital part of our overall business. With this explosion of retail activity, we realized we needed to find a solution to automate this aspect of Greever's.

ECRS: How did you come to choose Catapult as your retail solution?

Foster: We had been using manual cash registers for quite some time when one of my sales reps put me in contact with a pharmacy chain that was already using Catapult. They had some very compelling things to say about the product on both the POS and back office level. We had researched some other packages, but they were either too pricey, or just very unimpressive in terms of capability. Catapult was well within our budget and had the features and functionality we were looking for.

ECRS: How has Catapult changed the way you do business?

Foster: The first thing that comes to mind is the way Catapult has simplified the way we receive new orders. We used to get sheets of price stickers from our wholesalers that would take a very long time to apply as we received new inventory and tried to get it onto the shelves. With Catapult's Inventory Import feature, I upload large item spreadsheets in a single step, instead of having to enter them into the system one at a time. I'm also very pleased with the way Catapult's inventory tracking gives me the detailed data I need to see the profitability and movement of all our retail items. This was all but impossible before we installed Catapult. Getting the optimum profit from each square foot is becoming increasingly more important. With Catapult, we now have the data that will allow Greever's to achieve this.

ECRS: How have your employees responded to Catapult's POS interface?

Foster: They love it. The touch screen layout is so much like using a manual register, they've all picked it up very quickly. See that woman over there (Foster points to a cashier)? Today is her first day on the registers, and now here at noon she's already very comfortable with the system. Also, it's very nice for me to be able to customize the POS screens to meet the needs of our various checkout scenarios. Being able to make quick adjustments to the system like this, without the aid of phone support or documentation, is a huge bonus.

ECRS: In what other ways has Catapult helped Greever's automate its procedures?

Foster: We have a great discount program in conjunction with our primary wholesaler, Cardinal Health, called "Leader Tuesdays." Cardinal gives us a cost discount on a different group of its items each month. We pass that savings over to our customers in the form of 25%-OFF Leader Tuesday discounts. Before Catapult, it was a big headache to switch out the new Leaders every month. Half the time we had no idea what items were supposed to be on sale for any given month. Even though Cardinal sends us bar coded shelf tags to display with the discounted items, the task of manually tracking those items was very difficult to say the least. But now that Catapult electronically receives the UPCs for the discounted group each month, we finally have control over our Leader Tuesday program. I use Catapult's Date Range Promotion feature to set the start and end dates for each monthly discount promotion. The savings is printed right on the customer receipt, which gives us a level of brand loyalty and customer appreciation we didn't have before. And because we have this data in the system, we have everything we need to make larger storefront displays with Catapult's sign printing module.

ECRS: Any other comments about the benefits you're seeing with Catapult?

Foster: With other pharmacies in the vicinity, it's very important that we maintain competitive pricing. I've always price-checked the competition and adjusted ours accordingly. Catapult streamlines this process for me and ensures that the very next order Greever's receives gets the adjusted shelf pricing we need to stay competitive. Processing credit cards through Catapult is a big plus as well. It's so much quicker and easier than our old zon machine. And Catapult's Suspend Sale feature is great, especially for a business like ours. We have a lot of elderly customers who like to chat with our cashiers while they write their checks at the register. As other customers begin lining up, the Suspend Sale feature lets us ring up other customers until the elderly customer is finished chatting and writing their check. This keeps everyone happy by allowing a constant throughput at the point of sale.

ECRS: Would you recommend Catapult to other pharmacy retailers?

Foster: Absolutely.

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