MARCH 5, 2014

Forget Amazon’s package-toting drones—the future of retail may lie in satellites. That’s how Lowe’s is catching up to Home Depot in the hunt for customers. Lowe’s, writes BusinessWeek(Feb. 26, 2014), says that “it has been gauging traffic at its almost 1,900 stores from space, scanning satellite images of its parking lots to find out how many shoppers it can expect at every hour of every day.” It has also started syncing its parking lot observations with actual transaction counts to see how many people drove away without making a purchase.

The space snooping is a great way for Lowe’s to manage its workforce, scheduling surges in floor staff when parking spaces are about to become hard to come by. Evidence shows the satellites are helping move the needle for Lowe’s. The fourth-quarter close rate—the share of shoppers who bought something—improved by almost 1%, and total sales per hour of labor increased by 2%. The company’s profit in the recent quarter increased 6.3%, while sales ticked up 3.9%.

Anyone who has every wandered through a hardware superstore looking for an odd screwdriver or a particular kind of sandpaper understands how critical staffing is for Lowe’s. Cornering an aproned employee can seem more challenging than fulfilling the project. And there are few greater frustrations in retail than standing by with a simple question while another customer solicits a protracted product review.

Lowe’s and Home Depot more or less sell the same products at the same prices in the same places. Assuming their supply chains and marketing strategies are in sync, their market shares ride almost entirely on service. From that perspective, being able to have more employees around when more customers need help is success–and not paying them to sit around in the store when shoppers are sparse helps, too.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

“Hospitals have a drug problem.,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 24, 2014),  ”and they’re looking to technology to solve it.” The problem is the way medications are being mishandled by hospital pharmacies and wards. Inventory management is inefficient, drugs are too often misplaced, and narcotic medications are prone to theft.  In addition to turning to password-protected dispensing machines, RFID tags and roaming robots to deliver prescriptions, hospitals are adopting software that tracks every dose of medication to identify suspicious activity.

By making it easier to track medicines, the changes give nurses more time to spend with patients. Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, for example, estimates that its medication-tracking system saves the hospital $600,000 a year just in time lost from pharmacists, technicians and nurses locating meds. The new systems also help improve patient safety by identifying staffers who are siphoning drugs for their own use, a problem known as “diversion.” About 15% of health-care professionals are addicted to prescription drugs at some point in their career. These drug-related inventory losses cost millions each year. The software also allow hospitals to better manage inventory by not stocking medicines that are never used, or by keeping just enough of expensive drugs on hand to meet demand.

At the University of Maryland Medical Center, mobile robots deliver medications to nursing units. Pharmacy staffers print a label, scan and place the medication in one of the robot’s locked drawers, and then enter a destination into a program that communicates wirelessly with the robot. The robot navigates its way to the right unit, where a nurse uses a passcode and fingerprint scanner to retrieve the medication. Delivery reliability—how often the drugs arrive at the unit as promised—has increased by 23%, and delivery predictability—how often they get there within the time promised—has risen by 50%. The per-trip cost with a robot averages $2.40, down from $5.50 for hand delivery, and in its first year the system freed up 6,123 hours of nurses’ time.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.