When times are tough, tough decisions are often made. 

Let’s think of it this way: if you have $5 in your wallet, you can fill your stomach at lunchtime with a fast food 4 for $4 meal and still have some change to spare.  It’s so much easier to make that quick trip through the drive thru lane without the immediate thoughts of the long-term implications.  With every McNugget you consume, though, you’ve made a choice between a healthier option – investing in your future – and the easier option.  When the times are tough and it’s easier to look away from the complications associated with your possibly questionable decisions. Time will tell how those little decisions add up, and the effect on your overall health.  However, it’s reasonable to assume that choosing a non-fast food option has less impact on your cardiovascular health, diabetes risk, and weight gain than would the “easy” route.

Right now, organizations worldwide are being faced with similar situations.  Do we invest in infrastructure that’s necessary for the long term, or look to make short term cuts to make ends meet?  It’s far easier to recognize the short-term gain of saving money to reallocating resources away from areas needed to maintain the business over time.  More stories come to light every day as to these difficult decisions that are being made with furloughs, layoffs, and downsizing.  Sure, you’re saving money today to hit budgetary constraints – but what happens in 3 months, 6 months, 12 month’s time when you need the results that should have been completed by those internal groups.

Compliance departments tend to fit in that unique position as well.  Their responsibilities are absolutely mission critical – yet oftentimes go unnoticed as valuable since they aren’t immediately revenue-driving in nature.  However, should a license lapse or accreditation falter, the contracts relying on those requirements (and the ability to drive associated revenue) goes away.  Why is it then that non-patient facing departments tend to be the ones that face the chopping block when times get tough?  Once you’ve missed deadlines, you can’t go back and recreate what’s missed.

That’s where STACK comes in – it’s the healthy alternative on the McNugget Budget. We’ve designed the infrastructure that can solve the short-term need of helping to offset budget restrictions while also affording the long-term solution of augmenting the support traditionally provided by personnel resources. With STACK, you have the resources at your fingertips to be able to both build and maintain a healthy framework for your organization. 

Times are tough – there’s great uncertainty in where the future is headed.  One thing is for certain: organizational compliance isn’t going to get any easier, no matter how you look to manage it internally.  Find ways to better reallocate your resources and set your organization up for future success – schedule a demo with STACK today.

Six Reasons to move from SharePoint to STACK 

#1: Complicated Setup and Maintenance 

Many people think that they can buy SharePoint, complete some setup, and get started. 

Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. 

SharePoint does have some out-of-the-box functionality – and you can build useful things with just those functions. If you want features that meet the needs of your company, you’ll need to work with a developer. That’s one of SharePoint’s weaknesses. 

If you’re at a big company, you might have a developer in house that can take care of it (it largely requires skill in ASP.NET, which isn’t uncommon). To get the most out of your system, however, you’ll need someone who’s well-versed in SharePoint development. That’s rare – and more expensive, which we’ll discuss shortly. 

The complexity isn’t over once you’ve customized your instance of SharePoint. It’s multiplied, in fact, because now you need to maintain and update it. If you want to install a new plugin, you may need to bring a developer back in. 

Updates can break your customizations, too. You’ll need more development to get things working again. 

Then there’s the maintenance of the whole system. You need to track of who’s using what, how your resources are organized, and how to get the most efficiency out of the structure you’ve had someone develop for you. That takes a lot of time. 

It’s not unreasonable to bring on at least one employee whose job is solely focused on SharePoint – a SharePoint Administrator. As you can imagine, that adds significant cost. 

#2: Expensive to License and Host 

Okay, so we’ve established that SharePoint can be expensive to set up and maintain. However, that’s not the only expense you’re looking at. One of the SharePoint’s disadvantages is its licensing structure. 

Here’s a quick breakdown: 

• SharePoint Online 1: $5/user/month 
• Office 365 Business Essentials: $5/user/month 
• SharePoint Online 2: $10/user/month 

• Office 365 Business Premium: $12.50/user/month 
• Office Enterprise E3: $20/user/month 
• SharePoint 2016 server (for on-premises use): $2,500+* 

Good luck finding any information on how much it actually costs to run an on-site SharePoint server. In our research we have seen ranges from $2,845, $7,000, and $9,000 for server costs. It may depend on how many users you’re going to run through that server. 

How do you choose between these subscription levels? Your guess is as good as ours. Some include storage, others include access to standard Office apps (or no Office apps), you can get email, or not…working your way through the options is a bit like finding your way out of a maze. 

By the time you figure out which subscription plan you need, you could have set up STACK.  Not to mention, STACK is designed with pricing transparency in mind.   

#3: Requires Employee Training 

Even tech-savvy employees are likely to require training to get the most out of your SharePoint intranet, especially if you’ve done a lot of customization. 

Many companies offer SharePoint training course – that alone should tell you that SharePoint isn’t intuitive to use. If you have more than a few employees, that training is going to be expensive. 

And in addition to the monetary cost, there’s going to be a notable time cost as well. It can take you a quite some time to get your SharePoint instance fully set up. Getting all your employees trained is only going to add to the time before your company benefits from using it. 

#4: Poor Search Capabilities 

This might not seem like a big deal at first. So, what if the search function isn’t perfect? If everyone uses SharePoint like they’re supposed to, you won’t need advanced search performance. You’ll just be able to find things. 

That’s how it starts – you might continue thinking that for a while. 

But things spiral out of the control fast (as we’ll discuss in a moment). Subpar search is a big deal. If you look online for discussions of SharePoint disadvantages, you’ll see that this is brought up often. 

It’s one of the biggest limitations of SharePoint, and it’s worth keeping in mind. 

#5: SharePoint Always gets Messy 

If you’ve worked with SharePoint in the past, you’ve seen this happen. You go to track down a document from a few months or a year ago. It’s not where it’s supposed to be. Maybe there are multiple copies in a few different locations. The documentation that says where it’s supposed to be is wrong. You figure out who probably used it last. Then find out that they’ve left the company. 

That document is gone, and you’ve wasted several hours when you could have just recreated the document instead. 

The huge number of features, extensive customization, and a wide variety of uses within a single company means things get complicated very quickly. 

SharePoint best practices and workflows break down. People start cutting corners. Files get forgotten and misplaced. Within a few years, you have a big mess on your hands. For a long time, that won’t affect your employees’ day-to-day work. 

But after a certain point, SharePoint becomes more of a hindrance than a tool. (Which is why SharePoint has a reputation…too many people have seen this happen.) 

If you’re just using it for short-term document storage, that might not be a huge issue, but if you’re looking to create a SharePoint knowledge base that helps your employees be more productive, you probably shouldn’t. 

#6: SharePoint Is Slow to Adapt 

SharePoint is like a cruise ship: It’s huge and powerful. Nobody knows every part of it, but there’s no denying that it has some serious momentum. Trying to turn it with anything less than hours’ notice is next to impossible. 

Microsoft is an innovative company, but rolling out new changes to any of their products is a massive undertaking. That includes SharePoint. If you’re hoping for frequent updates with new features that help your company be more productive, you’re going to be disappointed. 

If you want your organization to move and adapt to new problems quickly, you need a tool that does the same. You need a tool that isn’t designed as a one-size-fits-all. SharePoint isn’t that tool – STACK is.  

SharePoint’s Disadvantages Can Cripple Your Productivity 

When you want to use a software platform to improve communication, collaboration, and productivity across your company, your first thought may be SharePoint. Don’t make that mistake. 

Instead, explore options that are laser-focused on getting you what you need. These are the tools that will help your employees be more productive, which means better results for your bottom line. In the pharmacy world, STACK’s curated information ecosystem approach not only addresses all of the reasons above to make the switch, it empowers your organization to overcome the deficiencies you find in software that’s been built for the masses.

Scaling your Operations – with STACK®  

Oftentimes for pharmacies, the excitement of scaling is met with struggle. 

When you’re at the point of hiring more employees and building additional processes for managing the needs of your patients; processes get increasingly complex, silos emerge, operations that were once effective break down, and efficiency takes a huge hit.  

This doesn’t have to be your reality. STACK is here to help. 

We’ve identified five of the most common problems pharmacy organizations (especially those that are rapidly scaling) face, and how STACK will solve them. You might read one and think, “yep, that’s us”, or maybe all five are relevant to your team in some capacity. Either way, STACK is here to assist. 

#1: Information Chaos 

The problem: Management does not have time to proactively collect, organize, and analyze business information, which makes it difficult (or impossible) to make data-driven operational decisions. 

The solution: STACK is designed specifically for collecting data from multiple business verticals (employee onboarding, accreditation, licensure, etc.) to organize and make easily accessible for teams across the company. Managers set up workflows and cadences for delivering critical information, as well as dashboards that update automatically to provide real-time snapshots of the organizational health of the pharmacy. 

#2: Lack of Insights 

The problem: Pharmacy informational insights reach the executive team once a quarter, at best. 

The solution: Once STACK is populated with your business information, the team running STACK becomes the liaisons between business operation data and the executive team. This could include sharing insights to advise on hiring, supplying accreditation data for access scaling, and ensuring decision makers have the critical information they need on a consistent basis. 

#3: Accountability Gaps 

The problem: Employee paperwork lives in multiple places, with no simple way to see it in aggregate. 

The solution: With a dedicated STACK for each employee, the team running STACK manages all employee asset channels (such as training attestations, licenses, credentialing documentation and more), and puts further accountability on each employee to stay on top of their own tasks.  Share this documentation across the organization where and when it needs to be utilized, and monitor compliance through integrated dashboards and reports. 

#4: Siloed Information Utilization 

The problem: Each department in your pharmacy manages information differently, creating inconsistencies and inefficiencies for the wider team. 

The solution: STACK helps streamline the entire information management process, both by keeping track of every active business asset and creating processes to increase efficiency through sharing resources. STACK users are tasked with preventing asset overlap, establishing effective workflows and creating relevant documentation, segmenting user populations, and ensuring the data coming out of all business documentation is clean and accurate. 

#5: Wasted Labor Around Tools 

The problem: There is expensive labor around SharePoint and Access tools in your tech stack that never fulfills your pharmacy needs (aka money down the drain). 

The solution: STACK manages your entire business as a pharmacy information ecosystem, without the need for expensive professional labor to build and maintain. Unlike other solutions, STACK is curated for the needs of a pharmacy, instead of applying one-size-fits-all software to complex, unique business needs.  The platform is easy to maintain both when first implemented and on an ongoing basis. Using STACK to facilitate best practices helps ensure everyone gets the most out of your pharmacy information.