Last month, members of The DaVinci Company team had the privilege of touring two of the VA’s Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies (CMOPs): the Great Lakes CMOP in Chicago and the Charleston VA CMOP in South Carolina. Both visits gave us an up-close look at the scale, precision, and dedication behind one of the federal government’s most critical missions: making sure veterans get the medications they need, when they need them.

As a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business supplying medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical products to the government, we don’t just sell into this system; we’re part of it. Seeing that system in motion, on two different production floors in two different cities, reminded our team exactly why that distinction matters.

Great Lakes CMOP: 100,000 Prescriptions a Day

Our first stop was the Great Lakes CMOP in Chicago, one of the VA’s largest mail-order pharmacy operations. The facility fulfills approximately 100,000 prescriptions a day, Monday through Friday, for veterans across the country. Watching that volume move through the building, bottles filling, labels printing, orders sorting and shipping, all in a matter of seconds per prescription, is genuinely something to see in person.

The Great Lakes team is also looking ahead. The facility is on track to integrate state-of-the-art packaging machinery by fall 2026, upgrades that will further increase efficiency, improve accuracy, and drive savings for the government. It’s a reminder that even an operation running at 100,000 prescriptions a day isn’t standing still; it’s continuously being refined. For a company like ours that spends its days thinking about packaging configurations, order volumes, and delivery timelines, watching those upgrades take shape in real time was a valuable reminder of how quickly this industry continues to evolve, and how important it is for suppliers to evolve alongside it.

We’re grateful to our host, Justin Simon, for the fantastic tour and for his support of a proud Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned company. Conversations like the one we had with Justin are exactly why visits like this matter: they connect the people building and running these facilities with the suppliers whose products move through them.

Charleston VA CMOP: Precision, Scale, and Partnership

A few weeks later, our team headed to the Charleston VA CMOP, a facility that processes approximately 110,000 prescriptions every single day. Every conveyor, scanner, bottle sorter, packaging station, and quality control checkpoint on that floor has been engineered around one goal: ensuring veterans receive the right medication, at the right time, every time.

What made the Charleston visit especially valuable wasn’t just seeing the technology; it was understanding how manufacturers and distributors can become better partners to the VA. Rather than viewing the CMOP as just another customer, we see it as a critical link in the supply chain. During our visit, we talked through ways The DaVinci Company works alongside the CMOP to help position our manufacturers’ products for greater efficiency inside the facility. Something as simple as selecting the optimal bottle size or packaging configuration can significantly cut down on the repackaging required once a product arrives. When thousands of prescriptions are moving through the system every hour, eliminating unnecessary handling saves time, reduces labor, and gets medications to veterans even faster.

Watching the automated bottle sorting systems, high-speed bottling lines, and repackaging equipment in Charleston reinforced a lesson that applies just as much in Chicago: success isn’t only about supplying a quality pharmaceutical product. It’s about delivering that product in a way that integrates seamlessly into the VA’s operational workflow. It’s a lesson that shapes how we evaluate every manufacturer relationship we take on, well before a single order ships.

What These Visits Mean for Us

Touring these two facilities back to back gave our team a fuller picture of just how much precision goes into getting medication into veterans’ hands and how much of that precision starts upstream, with the choices manufacturers and distributors make long before a product ever reaches a CMOP loading dock.

We take pride in being more than a distributor. We work closely with our manufacturing partners to understand how their products will be received, stocked, repackaged, and ultimately dispensed throughout the VA healthcare system. Those operational details matter, and they create real value for the government, and most importantly, for the veterans who rely on these medications every day.

Our thanks to the teams at both the Great Lakes and Charleston CMOPs for welcoming us and sharing the incredible work they perform day in and day out. The professionalism, dedication, and innovation we saw at both facilities were outstanding, and they left our team with a renewed sense of purpose. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the VA and our manufacturing partners to improve efficiency throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain and better serve those who have served our country.