A pharmacist who learnt to build the systems

On a Saturday evening in 1999, at a dispensing counter in Kagoshima city, I watched a colleague check one prescription three times because the label printer and the medicine-history record disagreed about a dose. Neither error reached the patient; the printer had been fed from an older master file. Establishing that took forty minutes while eleven people waited on the benches. I still think about that evening. In a pharmacy, technology is judged at the moment a qualified person must decide whether to trust what the screen says.

I studied pharmaceutical sciences at Satsunami College of Pharmacy, graduated in March 1998 and qualified as a pharmacist that spring. I joined Kusunomi Drug in April, when it had 61 stores and six dispensing counters. My first five years were spent at those counters and on the shop floor: checking prescriptions, answering questions about cold remedies and stomach medicines and, on busy afternoons, working a till. I had no plan to work in technology.

In 2003 the company decided to add dispensing pharmacies to many more stores and asked for a pharmacist to work beside the systems section while a dispensing and medicine-history system was introduced. I volunteered, partly because of that Saturday in 1999. For five years I wrote requirements, tested screens with working pharmacists and argued for checks that slowed the process wherever a person needed to look. From 2005 I studied part-time at Tenmaguri Graduate School of Informatics, finishing a master's degree in 2007, because I wanted to understand what I was asking engineers to build.

In 2008 I left to become a product manager at Sawarabe Pharmacy Systems in Fukuoka, which supplied dispensing software to about 900 pharmacies. There I learnt how releases are planned, how a fault reported by one small pharmacy becomes a correction delivered to all of them, and how easily a supplier's priorities drift away from a customer's working day. I also learnt to decline a request that would have pleased one large chain and confused several hundred independent pharmacists.

Kusunomi Drug asked me back in April 2012 to manage store systems. The chain had 140 stores and was adding bread, chilled foods and prepared dishes to serve towns whose supermarkets had closed or shrunk. Between 2013 and 2015 I led the replacement of tills and back-office systems in 152 stores without closing any of them for a trading day. From 2017 I ran store, payment and member systems, including the points card, its move to an app and the October 2019 change to two consumption-tax rates.

I became the company's first chief technology officer in March 2021. Until then technology had reported through the general affairs director, and most engineering lived with partner companies. I have kept the partners, because a regional chain cannot employ every specialism, but I have rebuilt our own ability to specify, test and decide. The division has grown from 38 to 71 employees. We now write our own acceptance tests, and no supplier signs off its own work in our stores.

My working method begins with the people nearest the work. Before a system reaches the stores, a store manager, a pharmacist and a checkout supervisor use it on an ordinary trading day rather than in a demonstration. I ask my team to show where any saved minutes will go. Most of our towns are short of part-time staff, and a system that saves time in the back office while adding it at the dispensing counter makes a store worse, however good the project report looks.

Colleagues would probably say that I am patient with stores and impatient with vague estimates. I ask suppliers for the conditions under which their projection fails, and I ask our own teams the same question. I would rather report a smaller benefit that holds than a larger one that dissolves in the second year. That habit has cost me some arguments with merchandising and marketing, and I have lost a few of them for good reasons.

I present to our board every quarter and report each year to our audit and supervisory board members on system controls. I attend as an executive officer and have never held a directorship. I would like to bring a practitioner's view of store technology, payments and customer data to another company's board, knowing that I would first need to learn its business before my view became useful there.

Open to Board appointments

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