(gentle music)
- Walgreens Boots Alliance
is one of the world's
largest companies focused
on the community pharmacy,
health, and wellness.
We exist to help people live
healthier and happier lives,
to really improve the health and wellbeing
of all the communities in which we serve.
- There's two things that our
customers are demanding of us.
They want visibility into our inventory.
They want to know what we have,
and they want to know that they
can get it how they want it.
- The digital transformation
has been really
one of the top four strategies
of WBA as a company.
Moving from a company
that is only physical
into a true omnichannel.
- So agility is a big factor
on why we partner with Microsoft.
We use SAP predominantly for
our retail supply chain system,
and also finance.
One of the reasons why we moved to Azure
is so that we could take advantage
of the scale out infrastructure
that HANA is capable of,
and it is becoming, if not
yet, the biggest implementation
of SAP S/4HANA on Azure.
We were only granted less
than 20 hours of downtime
to move almost 100 terabytes of data
to our new Azure datacenter.
The impact from the
store is the performance.
They feel that the system
is more responsive,
and what we've avoided
is investing significant
amount of capital, or buying more servers.
- The big thing of
running SAP in the cloud
is being more flexible with workloads.
And with Azure, it's very easy to scale up
and to add more capacity.
Having our data now in
Azure and being able
to sort of combine that data,
much easier with other sources
to work more on the analytics.
- This will enable us now to
have our data in one place,
so that when we digest it,
we'll have a single story to share
that'll allow us to make
better decisions going forward.
- It has rapidly accelerated
because of COVID-19.
We have always been on everyone's corner,
and we've always been a
very convenient offer.
But now there is just an increased demand
for delivery or pickup without
having to come into the store
like we haven't seen before.
- The biggest transformation
is making sure
that we put the customer at
the center of the experience,
without any limitation.
Because we are now in the
position to have the environment
that allows us to be fast
and agile in responding
to the customer needs.