Story collection: Explore how WBA uses Azure to better serve customers

Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) operates several well-known retail pharmacy chains, including Walgreens, Boots, Duane Reade, and select Rite Aid stores, and it has affiliated stores in more than 25 countries. WBA touches the lives of millions of people every day, and the company strives to help every customer be healthier and happier.

To streamline operations and pave the way for new innovations in customer service and healthcare delivery, WBA is on a multiyear digital transformation journey that seeks to modernize all aspects of the business. Moving IT resources to the cloud—including migration of the company’s 100-terabyte SAP landscape—is a foundational step in this journey.

The following stories describe how WBA uses Azure and other Microsoft cloud services to operate more efficiently and deliver exceptional service to its customers.

CUSTOMER STORY

Walgreens Boots Alliance puts customers first in its digital transformation journey

WBA launched a multiphase digital transformation initiative that starts with transforming IT operations by moving as many of the company’s IT resources as possible to Azure. WBA successfully migrated its SAP landscape and continues to move servers and applications out of on-premises datacenters. The company has also implemented innovative new technologies like chatbots as part of its goal to create frictionless, omnichannel customer experiences for everyday use and for specialized needs like responding to COVID-19.

Read the WBA cloud strategy story

CUSTOMER STORY

Walgreens Boots Alliance delivers superior customer service with SAP on Azure

WBA has one of the retail world’s largest SAP landscapes, and the global company considers SAP to be the backbone of its daily operations. Working with Microsoft and other partners, WBA migrated SAP to Azure and is now rolling out the cloud-based solution to more than 9,000 stores. Application performance has improved, and WBA is consolidating all of its data in the cloud so that it can offer customers omnichannel service with features like real-time insight into store inventory.

Read the WBA SAP migration story

TECHNICAL CUSTOMER STORY

Walgreens Boots Alliance moves a mountain of SAP assets to Azure in a key modernization move

SAP plays a vital role in daily operations at WBA. So migrating the company’s 100-terabyte SAP landscape to Azure was a massive undertaking that required careful planning and close coordination with a network of skilled partners. The migration resulted in a high-availability, scale-out architecture with solid support for business continuity and disaster recovery, along with immediate benefits like increased CPU and memory capacity for better application performance.

Read the WBA SAP migration technical story

CUSTOMER STORY

Walgreens Boots Alliance boosts customer service with chatbots built on Azure

WBA always seeks to streamline customer interactions and facilitate better service. To help customers easily find information, WBA has begun adding bots to its branded websites. The first examples include a COVID-19 Risk Assessment bot for the Walgreens.com Find Care webpage and a generalized informational bot for the Boots pharmacy site. WBA expedited its bot development by using Microsoft technologies and opened up possibilities for new bots across the organization.

Read the WBA chatbot story

CUSTOMER STORY

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

Walgreens serves 8 million people every day, generating vast amounts of data in the process. To improve support for staff and better serve its customers, the company migrated its on-premises data warehouse to Azure Synapse Analytics. Walgreens now generates reports more quickly and easily, at one-third the cost of setting up a new on-premises data warehouse. Performance is at least three times faster, and annual maintenance costs are significantly lower.

Read the WBA Azure Synapse Analytics story

CUSTOMER STORY

Walgreens Boots Alliance trims in-store audit times by 75 percent with Microsoft Power Platform

WBA made life easier for its program’s managers by giving them Microsoft Teams and the Asset Protection mobile app developed with Microsoft Power Apps. The managers’ store visits now take 75 percent less time, comprehensive loss measurements are improving, and employees can more easily share information and glean significant business insights on a store, district, or regional level. By adopting Power Apps and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform, WBA has cut the time it takes an app to get from development to production by 50 to 80 percent. It now builds and deploys useful apps for employees in a matter of weeks instead of months or even years.