Automation of Pharmacy Inventory Management

Year 2012, Volume: 2 Issue: 4, 1 - 4, 23.07.2016

Zekerijah Sabanovic

Abstract

Pharmacy inventory management (PIM) comprises business activities which are connected with the size and placement of stocked drugs. To manage minimal and maximal drugs stock, orders dynamics etc., pharmacies must track expiration dates of each drug in stock. Outdated drugs can’t be counted as stock and produce lot of costs, especially for their disposal. The most number of pharmacies in Bosnia use European Article Numbering (EAN13) barcode by which is impossible to define drug expiration dates. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enables full automatization of PIM, but it is still not in use, mostly because of high costs of implementation of this system. In our research we have observed 52 Bosnian pharmacies and presented another approach to barcode technology which can be used in automatization of PIM. As the base we have used existing EAN13 code, adding 6 digits for expiration dates. We have successfully created and tested program for extraction of EAN13 and expiration dates from that barcode using separate files in database to keep inputs, outputs and stocks of each item by expiration dates

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