Walgreens Boots Alliance puts customers first in its digital transformation journey

With retail operations in more than 25 countries and a portfolio of digital platforms, Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) touches millions of lives every day. Whether they’re picking up prescriptions, buying healthcare and beauty products, or seeking connections to local health resources, WBA customers rely on the company and its employees to take a personal interest in their well-being.

“We exist to help people live healthier and happier lives—that’s our commitment to our customers,” says Francesco Tinto, Global Chief Information Officer at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “The work we do caters specifically to each and every community in which we have a store. Even though we’re a big company, local needs are very important to us, so we try our best to be the neighborhood pharmacist that customers can trust and rely on.”

With Walgreens stores in the United States, Boots stores in the United Kingdom, and affiliated brands like Rite Aid and Duane Reade, WBA is a major presence in the healthcare marketplace. In the United States, nearly 80 percent of the population lives within five miles of a WBA-owned drugstore, according to the company’s calculations. Keeping such a massive global operation running smoothly requires a forward-looking approach to technology.

“Technology innovation is a fundamental piece of any modern retail company’s strategy,” says Mike Maresca, Global Chief Technology Officer at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “It allows us to stay relevant in today’s marketplace and connect with customers in the ways that suit them best. Healthcare is a deeply personal concern, and we see technology as a way to personalize our service and create more value for customers while also transforming healthcare around the world.”

WBA realizes that to remain an industry leader, it must constantly adapt in real time to changes in customers’ healthcare needs. That encompasses everything from adopting an omnichannel approach to shopping with mobile and web-based retail options to creating a COVID-19 symptom assessment chatbot during the global pandemic and connecting at-risk customers to local telehealth providers.

To meet these challenges, WBA needs a firm technology foundation that can facilitate innovation and scale as the company grows. In January 2019, WBA signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft to facilitate the company’s Horizon Project, a multiyear, multiphase digital transformation journey. Using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform as a foundation, WBA is charting a course to the future that will not only optimize internal operations but will also facilitate new healthcare delivery models for even better customer service.

The cloud as a platform for modernization

The WBA digital transformation strategy aims to remake all aspects of the business. The first phase, Horizon 1, is well underway and focuses on IT transformation and workplace modernization. During Horizon 2, the company intends to transform its retail operations, and with Horizon 3, WBA plans to implement a new vision for the future of healthcare. Moving IT resources to Azure is an essential part of this strategic plan.

According to Tinto, the choice to move to Azure as the company’s cloud platform came down to three important elements. “The first reason for choosing Azure is the technology itself—Azure is a superior platform that includes all the tools and resources we need to implement our modernization plans,” he explains. “The second reason is the level of service that Microsoft and its partners can provide to an enterprise of our size. And the third reason is the spirit of innovation and leadership that comes with making this leap into the cloud.”

As part of the IT transformation pillar of Horizon 1, WBA is moving a significant amount of its compute resources out of its own datacenters and into Azure over the course of three years. This involves hundreds of applications, including the company’s massive SAP landscape, which is one of the largest in the world. WBA has been working with Microsoft Partner Network members Accenture and TCS on the migration, along with Microsoft and SAP.

Being in the cloud instead of datacenters helps WBA modernize applications and gain the greatest possible advantage from cloud-native technologies that provide capabilities that did not exist when aging on-premises applications were originally built. “The cloud is a basic IT element that helps us build a foundation to be agile, fast, and cost effective,” says Tinto.

In addition to the IT transformation effort, WBA is also modernizing its workplace, deploying Microsoft 365 E5 to 388,760 employees across the organization to ensure strong security and boost productivity and collaboration using Microsoft Teams. WBA has started building Teams into its mobile capabilities for supporting telemedicine, and store managers have transitioned to Teams to attend corporate meetings, an improvement over prior legacy applications. The company is exploring additional use cases that will see Teams and Microsoft 365 powering its digital workforce.

WBA has found that its Microsoft cloud investment translates to business and development efficiencies. “Thanks to a reliable cloud platform, we have agility and an infrastructure that scales as we need to,” says Maresca. “We no longer need to negotiate with vendors and purchase and install hardware. When we need computing power, we can provision it within minutes. This significantly decreases our time to market with new solutions, helping us roll out new capabilities in a matter of days or weeks.”

The cloud as a home for key business applications

Although WBA runs many applications that are important to the business, none is as vital to daily operations as SAP. “SAP is really the backbone of our back-office processes,” says Tinto. “General ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and all of our other financial processes are in SAP. More importantly, SAP unlocks the possibility of real-time visibility into store inventory, which is crucial for us to offer the best possible customer experience, whether online or in our shops.”

WBA took a careful approach when migrating its SAP system to Azure, working closely with its partners to ensure a smooth transition. The result of this thorough planning was a seamless cutover that had to take place during a brief 20-hour window in January 2020. “We shut the system down for the SAP migration on a Saturday night and then opened it up for business on Sunday mornings,” says Maresca. “We were very happy with the outcome, considering that we had to move almost 100 terabytes of data from an on-premises datacenter to Azure.”

Having SAP running in Azure has improved application responsiveness and given WBA the capacity that it needs to continue increasing its Azure footprint as it rolls out the cloud-based solution to more of its stores. “We were hitting capacity limits on our on-premises infrastructure,” says Maresca. “After moving to Azure, we noticed right away that our CPU utilization dropped to a very low level, giving us room to grow. This translates to a more responsive experience for our users.”

For WBA, the successful SAP migration represents an admirable collaboration between SAP, Microsoft, Accenture, and TCS. “All of the companies worked together as one team to ensure that the final migration would be seamless and free of any unexpected disruptions,” says Tinto. “We now have one of the largest instances of SAP S/4HANA in the cloud, and we have the flexibility and scalability to meet our ever-changing needs.”

For a more detailed look at the WBA SAP migration, read this case study and this technical case study.

The cloud as a facilitator of continuity and responsiveness

As a pharmacy and healthcare retail company, WBA has been at the frontlines of the global response to COVID-19. Like any enterprise business, WBA faced business continuity challenges as workers shifted from offices to remote work. With Microsoft 365 in place, the company found Teams to be a valuable resource.

“We very much appreciate the way that Teams has helped us continue to function in this time of home quarantine,” says Maresca. “Our employees were able to adopt it very quickly, and they’ve been pleasantly surprised by the power of Teams to foster collaboration. We would never have been able to achieve the same results with our legacy collaboration tools.” 

WBA has also used cloud technology to help its customers during the pandemic. “Because we have a lot of our data and coding environments in Azure, we’ve been able to build new products and services at scale, more quickly than ever before,” says Maresca. “We’ve launched things like drive-through shopping for essential healthcare items, and we’ve scaled our e-commerce platforms to meet unprecedented spikes in demand.”

Early on in the pandemic, when many people were seeking information about the virus and their own risk factors, WBA created a COVID-19 Risk Assessment chatbot on the Walgreens.com Find Care webpage using the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service. 

“We wanted to build a solution that would reduce the friction for customers trying to determine whether or not they need to go see their doctor,” says Giovanni Monti, Senior Vice President, Healthcare Services at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Rather than going to a government health website and trying to filter through all the rules there, customers can answer a series of simple questions and get an answer from the bot about their risk level. And if they need to see a doctor, we can help them find one through our telehealth partners.”

Adds Ankur Jain, Principal Architect, Digital Engineering at Walgreens Boots Alliance, “Because of the work Microsoft had already put into developing the Healthcare Bot service, we were able to put our COVID-19 response chatbot into production in less than a week, once we decided to move forward with it.”

Customers began using the bot as soon as it was released, and WBA has kept the content updated as government guidelines have changed. WBA has other chatbot projects in the works, too, including a question-and-answer bot for the Boots pharmacy website. The bot accommodates new demands from customers to digitally perform routine tasks, like refilling prescriptions or accessing general store information, without the need to make an in-person visit to a store.

To learn more about the use of bots within WBA, read this case study.

The cloud as a foundation for innovation

To make the most of its partnership with Microsoft and bring the company’s spirit of innovation to all aspects of operations, WBA intends to investigate and implement a wide range of solutions to solve technology challenges across the organization. For example, the company has used Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to more thoroughly understand how customers use the Boots Advantage Card loyalty program, and it is piloting an initiative using Microsoft HoloLens 2 for immersive, mixed reality training experiences. After moving its on-premises data warehouse for inventory management to the cloud, WBA is using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics to drive better decision making.

By migrating the bulk of its applications and data to Azure, WBA is setting itself up for a transformation in the way that the company works with data, thanks to applications like Microsoft Power BI. “Now that we’re in Azure, we can take advantage of the cloud-native tools that Microsoft has built, like Power BI, to be the data-driven company we’ve always aspired to be,” says Maresca. “We’re also positioned to take better advantage of AI and machine learning capabilities. All of this helps us better understand our customers so we can provide them with more seamless and frictionless experiences at all touch points.”

The move to Azure has provided WBA with a wide range of benefits that are the result of careful planning and a deep understanding of the complexities of such a move. “For any large enterprise, a cloud migration is more than just a datacenter change or a hosting strategy change—it requires a complete rethinking of how your IT organization operates,” says Tinto. “Working in the cloud requires a different skill set and a different approach to everything from architecture to security to application development. You need to have the right people and the right partners to make it a success.”

Like everything that WBA does, the migration project and the rest of the company’s modernization efforts come down to one thing: helping customers lead happier and healthier lives.

“In the past, the experience we were able to offer our customers was shaped by the way we built our systems,” says Tinto. “By moving to Azure, we’re opening up new possibilities for creating customer journeys that put the individual customer at the center of the experience, without limitations. It’s no longer a question of what we can do—it’s a question of what we want to do. Our only limit is our imaginations.”

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