Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- Retail pharmacies rely on tech innovation to ensure exceptional customer experience. However, there is a need to address the sustainability issues that may emerge as a result of the broader IT strategy they employ.
- We outline some software development practices – contextualized to the retail pharmacy business – that can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of a company with respect to storage and computing processes.
- While digital is the way to go for businesses across industries, doing it right is crucial. This requires a well-rounded, comprehensive software strategy that is not only sustainable by design, but also ensures superior service delivery and customer experience.
On this page
The carbon footprint of retail pharmacies
Like all other industries, digitalization of operations is a key focus area for the retail pharmacy sector.
This has improved operations and elevated customer experience, but not without a cost – the cost of burdening our already deteriorating environment. For instance, in the process of bringing pharmacy services to your doorstep, a lot of tele-health solutions have gained traction in the second half of the decade gone by. While these solutions have practically redefined availability and convenience, delighting millions of customers around the globe, their use – which will continue to rise – is impacting the environment, and not really in a good way. It may seem surprising to the uninitiated but high-speed IT transformations are directly or indirectly causing a spike in the digital carbon footprint.
Globally, organizations commonly use the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol to measure carbon emissions. GHG classifies the emissions in three categories, which are:
Scope 1: This pertains to the direct emissions from a company’s operations such as those from fleet vehicles. In the case of a retail pharmacy, Scope 1 emissions may be attributed to vehicles running between warehouses and stores for stock replenishment or those out on product delivery.
Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from running on a company’s servers such as inventory management, ecommerce apps, enterprise data hub or repository, PoS application, and so on.
Scope 3 – Other indirect emissions such as energy consumed while operating the front-end application by the consumers.
Given that Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions – which are the result of computing and software applications –are a tad difficult to measure and control, let us examine them in detail. Although several industry players have embarked on promising green initiatives at the functional level, there is a need to specifically focus on the IT domain in the pursuit of sustainable operations. We believe the tech fraternity to be playing a key role here as it all starts with adopting the ‘greenest’ possible IT practices.
Go digital, but the right way
Technology has contributed significanty to making people’s lives simpler by enabling easy access to a wide range of medicines.
And the same holds true for the pharmacists. For instance, an electronic prescription dispensing system helps them with faster prescription processing and seamless and accurate order fulfilment.
But with pharmacies going digital – which in one way is a start to the ‘green journey’ considering the business becomes completely paperless – the need for higher computing power is on the rise. Let us understand this in the context of the aforementioned order fulfillment scenario. Now, in order to ensure fresh orders and refill requests are tended to in a timely fashion, the application will need to read through the patient’s historical data, map that to the latest prescription from the respective doctor or medical facility, talk to the inventory management system to check for availability, perform drug utilization review (DUR) checks, and so on. For all this to happen at the click of a button, a system sure needs very high computing power. And this is just for one prescription at one pharmacy. Multiply it with the numerous prescriptions being handled at the same time across equally numerous retail pharmacies and you start to see the enormity of the issue.
Here is another angle to going digital. The switch from paper to digital surely improves operational efficiencies but if the digital replica of the paper record is not concise, it will translate to a considerably high use of energy.
Digitalization and modernization are no doubt the need of the hour, but it is also essential to that the IT solutions being adopted by retail pharmacies align to the broader sustainability agenda rather than hinder it.
The next-gen retail pharmacy: A shift from green to greener
Remote, anytime-anywhere pharmacy services are gaining traction, leading to a stiff competition among industry players for a piece of the pie.
Even as retail pharmacies accelerate digitalization to ensure they stay in the game, it is imperative that they investigate the impact of existing and future IT solutions and devise a strategy to mitigate or eliminate the detrimental effects, if any. We propose a three-pronged appraoch – software, hardware, process – for retail pharmacies to drive their sustainability agenda. The measures we outline here are not just applicable to retail pharmacies though; they can, rather should, be adopted by businesses in other industries as well.
Software
- Responsible coding: Coding practices can be made environmentally sustainable by minimizing the energy consumption involved in processing lines of code. Industry experts cite that the functions written in C, C++, or Java are more energy efficient.
- Data deduplication: Basis our experience in working with leading retail pharmacies, we believe most of the prescription dispensing systems to have vast amounts of duplicate patient records. For instance, one such system at a leading US pharmacy had some 13 million duplicate records in December 2022, which ballooned to a little over 17 million by July 2023 – a whopping 30% increase in just about six months. That explains the scale of the issue. By removing duplicate data using intelligent solutions involving fuzzy logic, organizations can free up a lot of storage capacity and ease traffic load.
- Virtual machines (VMs): Virtual machines consume significantly less energy as several can reside on a single server. But just introducing VMs is not enough. Rules-based automation for VM optimization needs to be implemented—including deleting idle VMs that are not being used for any business operation. Additionally, the size of VMs must be kept in check by regularly incorporating rightsizing best practises in order to prevent overprovisioning. Finally, VM instances should be scheduled to automatically start and stop if VMs are needed only at certain times.
- Clean UI-UX: Customers need a feature-rich web portal that offers them ample ease and convenience when availing of the services they need. This has resulted in pharmacies loading and layering their apps and websites with more and more features. As per Website Carbon Calculator, an average web page produces nearly 0.5 grams of CO2 per pageview. This translates to a whopping 60 kg of CO2 annually for a website with 10,000 monthly pageviews. Good user interface and user experience (UI-UX) practices can go a long way in containing the impact a pharmacy’s online presence may have on the environment. For example, dark color schemes in a mobile application save a lot of energy as compared to a light color scheme. The use of CSS or SVG file formats for illustrations, as opposed to JPG, PNG, WebP files should be prioritized. There is energy consumption associated with every page load; portals and apps should be designed in a way that users are able to find what they’re looking for in minimal number of clicks and page loads.
- Green digital receipts: Digital receipts are a great way to reduce paper usage. Currently, the receipts that pharmacies provide to the customers are too lengthy. Digital receipts should be made as concise as possible. Using non-fancy fonts (preloaded in the software) will save the energy consumption a great deal as it will help reduce the file size, and thereby storage.
Hardware
- Point of sale (POS) systems: Retail pharmacies dispense billions of prescriptions annually. An efficient POS system that doesn’t need much maintenance and consumes less power could contribute significantly toward a pharmcy’s sustainability initiatives.
- Picking systems: Picking systems are used in warehouse facilities to select and consolidate a particular order. A picking system usually requires 1.2 kW at full capacity. In standby mode, it uses only 0.3 kW. This consumption can be decreased to 0.1 kW by using an integrated energy manager, which switches off the electrical components of the system to standby mode.
Process
- Carbon-aware DevOps: Pharmacies have to comply with a lot of guidelines set by regulatory bodies. DevOps enables them to improve compliance and build software systems faster by reducing the cycle time. But the process of code check-in process involves triggering a pipeline process that builds, deploys, and automatically tests the changes through multiple environments. Even if code is changed only in a few files, the automated build and test process will perform compilation and testing of a large number of monolithic components involving a huge number of files which haven’t even been changed. Therefore, developers must consider using appropriate filters and only running pipelines where it is mandatory. This will serve as a significant step toward carbon-aware DevOps. Also, DevOps teams can identify applications which are no longer in use, set retention policies to automatically delete obsolete data and any redundant storage resources.
- Return to stock (RTS): RTS is the process of reversing a dispensed medication which is not collected by the patients. Often, prescriptions are digitally sent to the pharmacy without the knowledge of patient. Additonally, some prescriptions are set to autofill even when the patient doesn’t need refills. A single prescription has a lot of components to it. For example, the medication itself, a plastic vial, printed label, leaflets about the medication, and so on. Thus, efforts made toward reducing RTS incidents – like patient counseling - can greatly reduce the reprinting of labels.
Toward a greener future
Retail pharmacies the world over have already shown solid intent in being responsible toward the environment.
They just need to up the game a little. A bit more vigilance and optimism in making green IT practices a tad greener can accelerate sustainability initiatives considerably. The entire IT environment at a retail pharmacy – both hardware and software components included – contribute to the company’s carbon footprint. In the era of quick retail, companies might hesitate to address these sources of Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions. This is because tackling this aspect while ensuring superlative service delivery and customer experience can get a bit daunting.
To realize sustainability goals in their truest sense, companies must ensure that going green in one way (moving from paper to electronic records) doesn’t have a negative impact on the environment in another way (the carbon footprint of data centers and computing servers) – basically, collateral damage ought to be avoided at any cost. This requires a well-thought-through and comprehensive approach to going green.
However, with today’s consumer being a lot more aware and conscious of environmental concerns, a company can hope to elevate its brand image if it takes serious steps toward sustainability and environment-friendliness. Retail pharmacies that support environmental goodwill and post an impressive environmental, social and governance (ESG) report card are sure to deepen customer loyalty and gain a distinct edge over the competition in this ever-so-cluttered marketplace.
