A data warehouse in the cloud helped Walgreens transform operations and accelerate decision making

Walgreens, a 118-year-old drugstore chain, has more than 9,200 stores across the United States, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and employs more than 240,000 people. To help determine which products customers want, Walgreens must process, analyze, and report on vast amounts of store data every day.

Data-driven inventory

Walgreens serves approximately 8 million customers each day, in stores and online, creating huge volumes of data over time. To generate insights that help store managers and staff provide customers with the products they want and best manage inventory, these transactions are compared to at least two years of historical data across the supply chain. And on top of this complex data landscape, Walgreens has recently acquired other retail pharmacies, adding even more data points to analyze.

“Data is critical for everything that we do at Walgreens, and with that data the customers are telling us what they buy and what they need,” says Andy Kettlewell, Vice President Inventory and Analytics at Walgreens.

The cost of on-premises solutions

Before turning to Azure for a modern data warehouse solution, Walgreens expanded its own data warehouse by adding storage to the physical datacenter, which could take between three and six months and require capital investments. As its data grew over time, its on-premises solution couldn’t support the speed or amount of data being added to the system.

Looking for an opportunity to explore new data warehouse solutions, Walgreens identified three possible cloud solutions. One solution would have cost significantly more than Azure, so it was deemed as not a suitable option. The other solution scaled appropriately, but lacked the security, operational, and integration benefits that Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provided. For Anne Cruz, IT Manager for Supply Chain and Merchandising at Walgreens, this made Azure the top choice.

Microsoft partnered with Walgreens to ensure that Azure Synapse was the right solution for Walgreens, going so far as to evaluate how other cloud providers might better serve the company’s needs. Then the Microsoft team worked with Cruz to develop an Azure Synapse pilot from which Walgreens could move directly into production once it was time to go live.   

A cloud platform with on-demand scalability

In three months, Walgreens was able to migrate its entire on-premises data warehouse for inventory management into Azure Synapse. Data flows into the cloud through Azure ExpressRoute and into Azure Blob storage. Users can consume the data through a web app developed in-house, direct query to the database, or through visualization tools such as Microsoft Power BI. This capability drives better decision making.

The results were transformative for Walgreens. Instead of waiting until as late as 1:00 PM to get a report on the previous day’s data, users now have reports available by 9:00 AM every weekday. Supply chain analysts can also get more out of their reports by connecting their Power BI app to Azure Synapse. Its drag-and-drop interface lets them quickly visualize and analyze data. “Azure was a third of the cost compared to setting up a new data warehouse appliance on-prem,” says Cruz.

Walgreens has seen annual maintenance costs for its data warehouse solution drop significantly, while performance is at least three times faster with Azure Synapse.

A lasting partnership

A team of Microsoft specialists worked closely with Walgreens to make sure that Azure Synapse was not only the right solution for Walgreens, but that Walgreens can leverage it far into the future. Building on the success of Azure Synapse, Walgreens is now evaluating opportunities to move more of its infrastructure to Azure. As Cruz says, “We’re heavily invested in digitalizing all of our technology solutions—and having Microsoft as our partner behind it.”

For more about the Walgreens migration, watch this video.