A Pharmacy Retailer gains Loyalty through Personalization
Preparing for the International Trade
The client is a multinational pharmacy retailer. The pharmacy chain employs 7,500+ people and operates 650+ stores across Australia and New Zealand, and is branching out into the EU with its first store in Ireland. The firm has often been compared with the global QSR giants as their equivalent in pharmacy because of the scale of its operations.
The firm’s USP is its ability to provide competitive prices through large sales volumes. Its objective, to enhance healthcare outcomes via the most effective and efficient means – providing care and high savings to the patient. To this end, the company sought complete digital integration in its retail operations, a need that gained urgency as a result of lockdowns and pandemic-induced changes in shopping behaviour. The company also needed to ensure that its systems would adapt to its fast growth rates and expansion plans, both across sales channels and across countries. With the increased emphasis on online shopping, the system needed to be able to provide a welcoming customer experience. And finally, since the company’s main line of business medicines and drugs, its systems needed to ensure that laws and guidelines governing prescription sales were adhered to.
Problem Statement
In 2020, The firm had planned to expand into Ireland, using its European tilt as a springboard to shift from discrete, on-premise business systems to a globally supported cloud-based platform. According to the CIO of the firm, the transition was a critical component of their plans. “This transformation will ensure all of our international franchises will operate on one platform, solving a lot of operational barriers. It will allow us to consistently manage and maintain various systems across the world using best practice infrastructure with greater availability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness than our on-premise solution could afford us,” says the CIO.
To provide the best possible support, Sonata, through its Australian arm Sonata Scalable, drew on its deep pool of experience with Microsoft Dynamics, and its own involvement in product engineering with Microsoft, to provide an optimal solution
A Personalized Solution
Full-blown Dynamics 365 solution offering
- Region specific dispensing systems
- Localized currency and tax-coding support
- B2b interaction management
- Supply chain and logistics optimization
- Corporate, individual and franchise billing
- Back-office operations
Customer Experience Management (Mission Happiness)
- True omnichannel retail experience
- Order tracking
- Delivery transparency
- Bespoke solution development, using PowerApps
- Point of sale systems for in-store ordering
- Store planning
- Catalogue management
Adapting to Growth
For the retail chain’s technical team, shifting to the cloud frees them up to focus on the company’s expansion plans. “If I go into a new country, the last thing I need to do is purchase hardware, set up servers, and provide services that way. I can just consume them,” the CIO of the firm says.
“By choosing to adopt a modern, cloud-based approach, the company must either rewrite their applications or adopt a new standard and deploy that. Running with a long-term strategic initiative demonstrated enormous trust in Microsoft and Sonata Scalable," says Brett Crew, VP Sonata Australia, and CEO & Founder, Scalable.