Pharmacy Service Improvement at CVS (A): On a Thursday afternoon in July of 2002 Jon Roberts, Josh Flum,Tom Grossi, and Mitch Betses walked: Supply Chain Management Strategies, Assignment, HBS, Singapore

Pharmacy Service Improvement at CVS (A)

On a Thursday afternoon in July of 2002 Jon Roberts, Josh Flum, Tom Grossi, and Mitch Betses walked into a cluttered conference room at CVS headquarters in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. For several months, the room had served as the data repository, meeting space, and nerve center for the company’s Pharmacy Service Initiative (PSI). Most horizontal surfaces were stacked high with folders, binders, and books, and most vertical ones were covered with whiteboards, sticky notes, sheets of paper, and hand-drawn flow charts.

The four men cleared off enough space to sit down around a table.
Their eyes were drawn to two recently added pieces of paper on the nearest wall. One was a list of the problems the PSI team had uncovered during a recent series of observations at CVS pharmacies around the country (Exhibit 1); the other was a description of the problems encountered over the course of a single shift by the person staffing the prescription pickup counter in one pharmacy (Exhibit 2).