A Three-Branch Pharmacy Group and the PPB Register
Retail pharmacy group, 3 branches · Nairobi metro
This is an anonymised, composite account drawn from deployments of this type. The facility is not named because we do not have permission to name it, and no performance percentages are quoted because we have not measured them. What is described here is the change in how the work is done, which is the part we can stand behind.
Where they started
Three branches. Each with its own till, its own stock book and its own hand-written controlled substances register. The owner visited each branch to understand its stock position, which meant the group's true position was never known at any single moment.
Two specific pains drove the project.
The register. The PPB controlled substances register was written up at the end of each day from the day's prescriptions. Sometimes it was written up at the end of the week. Once, before an inspection, it was written up from memory and till rolls — which is exactly the failure a register exists to prevent, and everyone involved knew it.
Expiry write-offs. Stock expired at one branch while the same item was selling at another. Nobody could see it, so nobody moved it.
What changed
The register writes itself. A scheduled-drug dispense at the till writes the register entry as part of the sale: date, drug, batch, quantity, patient, prescriber, dispenser, running balance. There is no end-of-day writing up, because there is nothing left to write up. Entries are not retrospectively editable; a correction is a new visible entry, which is what a register is for.
Inspection day is now a date-range export rather than a week of anxiety.
One stock position. All three branches report into one view. Slow-moving stock at one branch that is selling at another is visible, and a transfer is recorded on both sides so nothing leaves without arriving.
Expiry with usable lead time. Alerts fire far enough ahead that stock can still be moved to the branch that will sell it. That converts a write-off into a transfer, which is the whole game in retail pharmacy margin.
eTIMS at the till. Invoices are eTIMS-compliant at the point of sale rather than being re-entered later.
What was hard
Opening stock. Same lesson as every other deployment: three simultaneous physical counts, on a Sunday, with the branches closed. It is a genuinely unpleasant day and there is no way around it. Every group that tries to shortcut it by trusting the existing stock book spends the following month arguing with the system instead of using it.
The second difficulty was social rather than technical. One branch had a long-serving counter assistant who had kept that branch's register by hand for years, accurately and with real pride. A system that does it automatically reads as a judgement on that work, and it needs handling as such. We made the point plainly: the system is not there because they were doing it badly, it is there because the group is now too big for it to depend on any one person's diligence.
Where they are now
The register is produced on demand. The group's stock position is one screen. The owner has not driven to a branch to count stock in over a year.