Oracle CEO interviews Walgreens around its IT capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO — In order to reach the corner of "Happy and Healthy," Walgreens' IT department has had to design a back-end engine that is not only able to seamlessly feed a robust retailer/customer relationship and the supply chain underlying that relationship, but also develop a comprehensive portal through which Walgreens' healthcare practitioners can effectively communicate with both patients and practitioners. 

 

"We're moving to a personal relationship with our customers, which in retail has never been seen before," Tim Theriault, Walgreens SVP and chief information, innovation and improvement officer, told Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, here during an on-stage interview before attendees of Oracle's OpenWorld conference. (Click here for the full Mark Hurd presentation.) "We rolled out a loyalty card program and that's given us new data and insights about our customers that we can use to work with our suppliers and our vendors," Theriault said. "We can also use it to make sure that we have an understanding as to what the local stores should have - like lobster in Boston [or] pictures of Elvis in Las Vegas," he said. "We can take all the social mobile analytics and then really through the mobile app engage with our customers in ways that we've never been able to before. And that's just in our retail part of the business."

 

In addition to that, Walgreens is establishing a healthcare conduit between patient and doctor. "Around healthcare, we all know we have a crisis in this country and everyone in healthcare wants to reduce cost, improve outcomes and at the same time create a better customer experience," he said. "We've rolled out Walgreens HealthCloud, which is basically our cloud application to allow our people to perform clinical services in the stores. ... And with that information, we can share with doctors [and] hospital systems. We're really on the early stage of this, but for us it's fundamentally important to provide that new healthcare experience for customers."

 

Along with molding a unique customer experience and enabling convenience-oriented healthcare, Walgreens is about to elevate those core functions to a global platform with its acquisition of Alliance Boots, Theriault said. "The combined company will be the largest purchaser of drugs in the world," he said. "We'll have 370 distribution centers around the world servicing 180,000 pharmacies and doing that in 20 countries."