When simply participating in household receiving and delivering the Chinese-Medical-Crops(CMCs) of the drug store, I felt strongly that the processes dealing with CMCs in our store was out-of-date. As a useless bachelor of e-commerce, I should have taken BPR and helped to improve it. But having seen cases of firms pulled down by inadequate infosys, I’ve done nothing for prudence.

Drug wholesale-and-retail industry is with thin profit margins. For CMCs retailing, especially for our drug store, there happens to be a core competence of tradition. Drug stores with traditional layout, like CMC cabinet, and equipment like exquisite amounts and balances, create tradition-based impression and then customer-trust, and even monopoly. At the very least, we’ve succeed to have survived for more than 10 years without reaching peak or declining.

But that isn’t to say we have no problems. We are now in the trouble of high dimission rate, partly because of low industial average wage and stressful workplace during the spreading H1N1 influenza epidemic. Ironically, skilled emplyees of other drug stores would not turn to our store for higher payment because of not willing to be under extreme pressure, and it takes time for freshman to be skilled. When having to study 《Management》 by Robbins, I tried to proposed advices about improving workplace or motivating, but completely turned down with the reason “our store is too small to executive a big-company-based policy”. Maybe there is another reason, a potential one, that I’m not working in the store, and they will be always with those changes.

But they’re supporting any computer-based improvement, like many entrepreneurs introduced on the media, like our go-ver-ment. I think they prefer IT rather than gods. IT certainly has the possibility of changing life, I’m sure, only how it changes. At the principle simply derived from an infomationization pratice of an import and export firm, I think the bottom-up processing suits smaller firms. But it is important to keep the tools designed open and portable, for long-term consideration.

I’ve been placed too much hope to computerize the drug store. As “do not mend it if it still works If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”, maybe it’s time to mend it slightly. My plan of infomationization might start with an inventory management system, with database, bar code scanner and printer, which will not cost too much because the equipment is simple and cheap, and I’ll develop the program with Access myself.