Mini-Case 5: Information Flow, Decision Making and Incentive

Kris is a 19-year-old high school graduate who is seeking counseling to assist her in choosing a major for college. She graduated in the top 10% of her class and seems to identify well with other females in her age group. Kris grew up in a very traditional family where gender roles are very structured and evident inside and outside the household. Kris relies heavily on approval from her brothers and struggles to make decisions of her own.

Walgreen Co. (Walgreens) and its subsidiaries operate a drugstore chain in the United States. “The Company provides its customers with multichannel access to consumer goods and services, and pharmacy, health and wellness services in communities across America” (Walgreen Company). The firm currently operates two mail-order facilities and has 7,752 retail drug stores located across all 50 US states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia (Walgreens). Prescription drugs account

The Retail Pharmacy segment sells prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, beauty products and cosmetics, personal care products,

Allround is sold through both direct and indirect channels, the venue of direct to the retailer allows for more control over the product placement in the modes of independent drug stores, but for larger stores such as grocery stores, mass merchandisers, and chain drug stores the study found that they focus concerns on product turnover and given allowances for the product.

Reduced need for higher capacity at the supplier. This would be reduced because suppliers would not need to size their operations to deliver on the “one shot large volume order” and would be able to space these in time with orders at

For correspondence between two PCs utilizing a serial interface or a PC joined by telephone line to a server.

Different retailing businesses have very different distribution methods based on the types of product that they sell, some arguably more effectively than others.

Everybody reaches out of pocket to pay for different prescription drugs. Parents for children, elderly for health conditions, and pet owners for pets, but there is one extensive concern; the price and outcomes. Transiently, it may be common for someone to come out of pocket for some prescriptions, but when people draw out of pocket every time just to pick up a prescription drug, it becomes annoying and upsetting. Pharmaceutical companies like CVS and Walgreens collect over $1,000,000 dollars just from gouging people for medications. According to David Belk (M.D.), Pharmacies buy medication in mass from pharmaceutical corporations and suppliers, then sell for a profit. What everyone is trying to ask the companies though is why. Why would a top-producing company like CVS or Walgreens sell expensive medications to a group of people like the elderly for profit?

It will benefit from tracking response rates cause its like mobile networking and faster communicationMaking Business Decisions I

Inventory segmentation represents a substantial challenge due to the hardy product selection requirements for Internet retailers. Determining the products that must be handle in one 's own distribution centers, versus wholesaler distribution centers and producers places has an impact on cost service structure of Internet retailers (Chiles & Dau, 2005).

2. Streaming video applications where numerous people want to see the same show at same time, the information is being newly generated in real time

Suppliers: Drugstores obtain their prescription drug products from the drug manufacturers. Drug manufacturers have been accused of discriminatory pricing due to a practice of selling products to HMOs and mail-order houses at prices 40% to 60% under the price charged to community drugstores. The community drugstores have filed a class-action lawsuit in response to this practice. Many drugstores use large wholesalers as

The sales composition is split into 37% from grocery stores, 20% from drug stores, 35% from mass merchants and 8% from miscellaneous sources. 70% of their total sales value is derived from 10% of their important customers. The company has foreseen valuable increase in their demand and is about to face some problems due to their traditional distribution network and their competitors. To focus these issues, they have decided to improvise on certain issues by collaboration with suppliers and customers which are discussed below.

Current Industry. The retail drug industry’s 2010 combined annual revenue was $277 billion, according to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (Drug Store Industry…, 2011, par. 4).The big players in this industry are CVS Caremark, Corp. Walgreen Co., and Rite-Aid, Corp with Wal-Mart and Target developing more of a presence in recent years. According to the article, the drug store industry is very concentrated with the 50 largest companies generating about 70 percent of the industries revenue (Drug Store Industry…, 2011, par. 4). The industry had grown substantially in the last 50 years and will continue to innovate and develop well into the near future.

The TSCC model also encouraged O&M to want to get other hospitals in Seattle to use it. Stefanic believed that hospitals standardizing their orders would decrease O&M’s on-hand inventory SKUs, thus creating cost saving opportunities for the hospitals. However, O&M’s move towards fewer SKUs has proven a daunting task in the healthcare industry.