Community Health Solutions

Part of the Pharmatrade Group of Companies in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Community Health Solutions (CHS) was founded in 2004 with the objective to enhance community health by providing innovative healthcare solutions. CHS runs a network of 12 retail community pharmacies and drugstore ePharmacy, alongside an online drugstore. CHS has strong associations with governmental establishments, healthcare providers and community organizations. CHS excels in offering personalized services to community residents. Its services include, for example, diabetic corners in all major community pharmacies, to provide assistance to patients with diabetes.

Searching for a streamlined system

The goal of CHS is to give the best possible services through its chain of pharmacies, ensuring the highest level of healthcare. In order to keep its standards high throughout the chain, CHS began looking for a management system to manage all its pharmacies end-to-end. The ideal software would be a streamlined solution that could cover all aspects of the business, while helping the company offer high quality customer service. It was extremely important for CHS to make sure that the chosen solution could handle stock, product expiry, warehousing, and management of retail items with related issues - barcodes, pricing, POS, insurance, etc.

LS Retail software: complete, end to end

CHS selected the LS Retail software solution as its new management system. LS Retail software offers a complete suite through which CHS can manage financials, supply chain, and its retail business in just one solution. As LS Retail software is totally integrated to Microsoft Dynamics, CHS was able to get a strong back end alongside a flexible, powerful front-end application.

A smooth implementation

The LS Retail software solution was rolled out and implemented in the back-office of CHS and in all twelve of the brand’s retail pharmacies. The implementation was managed by Think Tribe Technologies, an LS Retail certified partner. The CHS and Think Tribe teams took a very systematic approach to the implementation. The implementation partner team made sure to fully understand and analyze the business thoroughly before actually mapping the requirements back to LS Retail software. The analysis showed that CHS had made the correct decision selecting the LS Retail software solution, as most of the pharmacy chain’s business requirements were met in the standard version of LS Retail software. The Design Document completed by Think Tribe gave CHS a very clear picture and understanding of how the new system was going to benefit them. Anthony Thomas, Finance Manager at CHS, believes that this document was one of the key reasons of success of the project – alongside the system itself. From a technical point of view, LS Retail software proved to be the right choice for the retailer, meeting all the required aspects of the solution design. The roll-out of the solution in the retail pharmacies was smooth. Good training and testing ensured the success, and there were only very few hiccups on actual go-live.

Precise management, improved operations

Since implementing the LS Retail software solution, CHS has improves its ability to:

• Manage product batches and lot numbers.
• Manage medical insurance and insurance commission.
• Manage product expiry. CHS can now ensure that products which are not within an acceptable expiry threshold won’t be sold at the Point of Sale in the pharmacies.
• Manage retail promotions and offers.
• Handle inventory