Ireland's largest pharmacy group McCabes Pharmacy has carried out a company-wide digitisation strategy covering auditing, asset and stock monitoring, customer service, internal communications, and major projects.

As part of the move, the company has rolled out a workplace operations platform from SafetyCulture which has allowed it to move from a manual twice-a-day recording of fridge temperatures to 24/7 sensor-based monitoring.

The business, which has 110 locations across Ireland, says that this has helped it save over 3,000 staff hours and protected €100,000s of stock.

McCabes Pharmacy said that the technology has also improved its auditing and compliance "significantly" after stores moved from separate paper- and email-based processes to one company-wide platform.

Rather than errors being manually logged in spreadsheets and reviewed annually, it explained, issues are immediately visible to managers, actions are assigned to the correct person and can be acted on in real time.

The pharmacy group also now uses the platform to manage major projects, such as the rebrand of 80 stores to align all 110 pharmacies under the one name, as well as improve internal communications by enabling one-to-many alerts to be sent directly to colleagues’ devices.

McCabes Pharmacy has plans to roll out the platform to further areas, including support office functions, developing asset monitoring across facilities, and boosting analytics capabilities.

The technology is also used by Card Factory, Dunelm and JD Sports, as well as by thousands of UK and Irish companies in hospitality, manufacturing and other frontline sectors.

The pharmacy’s sister company United Drug – which provides pharmaceutical distribution services – also implemented the platform, "halving onsite injuries" and "improving health and safety across its warehouses."

“This has been a transformative way of working for us," said Jan Pieter Hallema, managing direct at McCabes Pharmacy. "Linking all our stores through one platform means we can spot trends, track resolution times, and improve our quality of service for every patient.

"In terms of asset monitoring, we can see straight away which fridges need fixing or replacing if the temperature goes out of range. Each fridge could be stocking as much as €30,000 worth of medication, so the potential loss across 110 sites is massive.”

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