LloydsDirect

While Principal Engineer at LloydsDirect, Jack embedded with the dispensary staff, identified a cost-reduction opportunity worth £3.18 million annualised and shipped a complete stock-recovery flow in eight weeks. The workflow was designed to divert more than 240,000 split packs from waste while adding less than six seconds to each dispense.

We had eight weeks. In a pharmacy that handles a million items, even small errors can jeopardise patient safety and drive up labour costs, so we couldn't afford to cut corners on accuracy just because the timeline was tight.

We started by working closely with the senior team to understand their safety concerns, operational constraints and what success actually looked like. Regular check-ins kept the feedback loop short, and a series of workshops gave everyone, us included, a shared understanding of how complex the system really was.

Design has to work on the dispensary bench as much as on a screen, so every touch target, scanner prompt and label was shaped for the real-world environment. We repurposed proven components from the existing system, involved the team as collaborators rather than just reviewers, and stripped out anything that didn't earn its place. That let us ship fast and clear some old tech debt in the process.

The underlying problem was simple once you saw it. LloydsDirect ships more than a million prescriptions each month, but pack sizes rarely match a doctor's order. Twenty-eight tablets prescribed, 32-count packs supplied, and the surplus gets binned. Our recovery workflow captures those leftovers, re-labels them in two quick scans, and feeds them back into stock. The waste disappears, and the whole thing scales without adding meaningful time to each dispense.