Tolin's Stays Ahead of the Competition with Retail Star

I'm Doug Schulz and I'm a registered pharmacist and I managed IT and operations for Tobin's. Tobin's is a family owned independent pharmacy and has integrated pharmacy natural products and the merchandise of a department store into one massive operation we call it Tobin's. Back in August of 2013 we segwayed into retail Starr the reason we did that is because we needed that pharmacy POS interface. 

Pharmacy Point of Sale Interface

The interface is between McKesson's enterprise our X and Retail Star when we want to dispense prescriptions to a patient. All you have to do is scan one barcode on the prescription bag and all of the drugs appear on your POS screen along with their co-pays and the customers name pops up on the POS screen.

Compliance with Federal & State Regulations

The integration is very important because it allows us to conform to federal and state regulations they want to know who is picking up that prescription and retail star tracks that and then sends that information to McKesson enterprise rx system and Retail Star allows us to compete with the larger chain stores and the reason for that is because the point-of-sale system is very very complete.

Staying up-to-date with Competition

It allows our buyers to purchase merchandise based on prior sales based on prior cost of goods sold it's giving us the technology that we need to run this business even though this is a very complex business.

Advertise to Your Customers with Targeted Marketing

I think if you want your customers to keep returning to your brick-and-mortar store you need to give them something to talk about. We have a fall event called Tia Tobin's, we advertise to about 65,000 households rather than just mass mailing or mass advertising which is very expensive, with Retail Star you can target market your customers. When the customer comes in and you ring up merchandise you're entering their name into the retail star system you can create just about any promotion that you can think of with retail star and that is HUGE.

Handle it all with Retail Star

One of the tools that we use with Retail Star is our portable scanners, and that allows us to speed up the check-in process. We've got about 40,000 items here in the store just imagine if you had to do that by hand, it would be impossible. You know when you look at Retail Star and the fact that it's able to handle healthcare, and retail, and all of the facets of our business I don't think you'd find another software package that can do that it's a fantastic system.