Walgreens doubles the robots to fill the prescriptions in the middle of the turnaround

While the pharmacy chains in difficulty endeavor to regain their foot, Walgreens Double automation.

The company expands the number of retail stores served by its micro-replacing centers, which use robots to fill thousands of prescriptions for patients who take medication to manage or treat diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions.

Walgreens aims to free up time for the staff of the pharmacy, by reducing their routine tasks and eliminating inventory waste. Less prescription fillings would allow employees to interact directly with patients and perform more clinical services such as vaccinations and tests.

Walgreens for the first time deployed the centers powered by robot in 2021, but interrupted the expansion in 2023 to focus on collecting comments and improving performance on existing sites. After more than a year of upgrade, including new internal tools, the company said it was ready to extend the scope of this technology again.

Walgreens told CNBC that he hoped that his 11 micro-replacing centers serve more than 5,000 stores by the end of the year, compared to 4,800 in February and 4,300 in October 2023. In February, the centers managed 40% of the prescription volume on average in supported pharmacies, according to Walgreens.

This translates into around 16 million prescriptions completed each month on the various sites, said the company.

The renewed automation thrust occurs while Walgreens is preparing to become private in an agreement of around $ 10 billion with Sycamore Partners, which should conclude by the end of the year.

The agreement would have a turbulent chapter for Walgreens as a public company, marked by a rocky transition outside the pandemic, down the pharmacy reimbursement rates, lower consumer expenses and fierce competition from CVS health,, Amazon and other retail giants.

Like CVS, Walgreens has gone from the opening of new stores to close hundreds of underperforming locations to consolidate the profits. The two companies run to remain relevant, because online retailers attract customers and patients opt more and more for fast home delivery during traditional pharmacy visits.

The changes also follow the dissatisfaction of the mounting among the staff of the pharmacy: in 2023, the debraying at the national scale highlighted professional exhaustion and the chronic sub-person, forcing the chains to re-examine their operational models.

Walgreens said that investing in robotic pharmacy fillings is already bearing fruit.

To date, micro-replacing centers have generated about $ 500 million in savings by reducing excess stocks and stimulating efficiency, said Kayla Heffington, vice-president of the operational model of the Walgreens pharmacy. Heffington added that stores using installations administer 40% more vaccines than those who are not.

“Right now, they are the backbone to really help us compensate for part of the workload in our stores, to obviously avoid more time for our pharmacists and technicians to spend time with patients,” said Rick Gates, head of the Walgreens pharmacy.

“This gives us much more flexibility to reduce costs, to increase care and increase the speed of therapy-all these things,” he said.

Gates added that the centers offer Walgreens a competitive advantage because independent pharmacies and certain rivals have no centralized support for their stores. Always, Walmart,, Albertsons And Kroger have tested in the same way or currently use their own micro-replacing installations to provide grocery articles and other prescriptions.

The micro-filling centers include their own risks, such as a strong dependence on sophisticated robotics which can cause disturbances in the event of errors. But the facilities become a permanent element in the retail trade due to the cost savings they offer and their ability to rationalize workflows, reduce employee burden and deliver goods to customers faster.

When a retail pharmacy of Walgreens receives a prescription, the system determines whether it should be completed at this location or transported to a nearby micro-filling center. Maintenance drugs or prescription drugs taken regularly to manage chronic health problems, and recharges that do not require immediate collection are often sent to the micro-infiltration.

At the heart of each installation is a highly automated system that uses robotics, conveyor belts and barcode scanners, among other tools, to fill the prescriptions. Operations are supported by a team of pharmacy technicians and other professionals.

Instead of the staff members fill in hand prescriptions in stores, pill bottles move through an automated and carefully choreographed mounting chain.

Pharmacy technicians fill the drug cartridges so that robot pods are dispensed, and pharmacists check these cans to ensure that they are correct. The yellow robotic arms grasp a labeled prescription bottle and keep it in a cartridge, which precisely provides the specific drug for this bottle.

Certain prescriptions are completed in distinct manual stations, including inhalers and contraceptive pill packs. Each prescription is then sorted and packed for delivery to the locations of the retail pharmacy for the final pickup.

There are other safety and safety measures throughout the process, Ahlam Antar, a registered group supervisor said in a micro-replacing center in Mansfield, Massachusetts.

For example, robot pods lock and automatically signal an error with red-orange light if a worker attaches a cartridge to the bad distributor, preventing incorrect pills from going to a prescription, she said.

According to Sarah Gonsalves, a principal technician from the pharmacy certified on the Mansfield site.

She said that fundamental part of her role is to ensure that technicians can correctly perform the different tasks of the process.

Antar, which has worked on the Mansfield site since its opening in 2022, said that Walgreens had made improvements to the micro-filling process after considering the comments of stores and patients during interrupted expansion. This includes the creation of new roles necessary to support the process on sites, such as a training manager for the 11 locations.

The installations also plan to move on to the use of smaller prescription bottles after hearing concerns that the current bottles are too large, according to a spokesperson for Walgreens. They said it will allow the centers to send more orders per order and reduce costs.

Heffington said automated locations have contributed to reducing the overall production costs of Walgreens by almost 13% compared to a year ago.

She said Walgreens also increased the limitation volume by 126% in annual shift, now fulfilling more than 170 million prescriptions per year. The company hopes to increase this number to 180 million or more.

Heffington added that Walgreens has implemented new internal tools to follow the work in the 11 centers and provide real-time data on the place where the prescription of a patient is found in the micro-realization process.

“If a patient called the store and said,” Hey, can you tell me where my prescription is today? “” [Workers] Can do so with great specificity, “thanks to new tools, said Heffington.

Despite the progress of the company, Gates said that there was more work to do with micro-replacing centers.

For example, he underlined the possibility of sending prescriptions directly to the doors of patients instead of putting this burden in retail stores.

“This is only the first step right now,” he said.

Other improvements may still be necessary in the facilities, according to certain reports. For example, Wral News reported in April that some customers of a Walgreens store in Garner, North Carolina, say that they only get partial prescription fillings, with several missing pills, or that their medication is delayed.

Before the Arizona store in Brian Gange begins to count on an automated installation, he entered the pharmacy every morning knowing that a massive list of prescriptions was in his queue of work while waiting to be filled for the day.

Now, with the help of micro-fulfillment, this list is much smaller every day, according to Ganges.

“We don't have to spend so much time on these repetitive realization tasks,” he told CNBC. “It really takes a huge weight on our shoulders.”

Ganges said it gives him, he and his team, the time to take the pharmacy counter and interact with face -to -face customers, answer questions, provide advice, carry out health tests or administer vaccines.

This kind of attention can make all the difference for a patient.

For example, Ganges remembers stopping for five minutes to take the blood pressure of a patient despite his submergation of tasks while working in another location of Walgreens several years ago. He ended up sending this person to the emergency room because their blood pressure was “out of the charts”.

This patient's wife visited the pharmacy the next day to thank Ganges, saying that her husband “would probably not be there with us today” without this blood pressure test.

“I shouldn't have to ask myself if I have five or 10 minutes to check a patient blood pressure,” said Ganges. “The micro-filling and centralized services are really what will allow us to do so, to have this time.”

“It really allows us to provide better care for them,” he added.