Measuring the effect of a new point of sale system on the performance of drugstore operations

A new electronic point of sale (POS) system was deployed by a Hong Kong drugstore-chain in eight of its drugstores as the first stage of a company-wide introduction of POS automation. The management wanted to know if the new system had a significant impact on the performances of the drugstores where the new POS system was deployed. We explain in this paper the computation of ratings that gauge the relative performances of the drugstores using a new procedure called operational competitiveness rating analysis (OCRA). We used these ratings to determine whether the drugstore operations improved significantly after the deployment of POS. A full discussion of OCRAʹs development and its computational procedure is also provided.