Walgreens Boots Alliance preps automated hubs for prescription fulfilment
Walgreens Boots Alliance plans to open 22 robot powered micro-fulfilment centres across the US to fill customers’ prescriptions.
By 2025, as much as half of the retailer’s total prescription volume could be filled at the automated hubs, says Rex Swords, Walgreens’ Group President of Centralised Services, Operations and Planning.
The move will free up more of pharmacists’ time to provide health care, Walgreens’ new CEO, former Starbucks Operating Chief Roz Brewer, said in an interview with CNBC.
“We’re doing all of this work, so that the pharmacist has an easier job, so that they can get back to being front and centre, building a relationship with that patient and interacting the way they were trained — the work that they love to do,” she commented.
Pharmacists will continue to fill time sensitive medications and controlled substances at local stores as the robot centric facilities are rolled out.
Boots UK IT Stores Day
Walgreens owned Boots UK recently completed its first ever IT Stores Day.
On Thursday last week, the retailer’s IT team visited over 320 stores across the UK.
In a LinkedIn post, Rich Corbridge, Chief Information Officer at Boots UK & Ireland, said: “The last two years have seen us invest in where the customer wants to engage with us, on line and mobile and that’s got to have been right, but when we now talk to our colleagues in store they ask that we bring back that store centric view of the world. And today, 18th of March, we are trying to do that in one immediate and big way.”
Boots store colleagues were asked what they need from technology in 2022 to truly make every customer moment in-store amazing. Then work started on turning all this insight into a strategy that Boots can implement.
Corbridge wrote: “We were able to present the findings from yesterday’s miles and miles and in a one hour ‘breakfast show’ we showed our whole organisation what it means to be working at Boots in 2022.”
“It’s an organisation that values everyone's opinion and wants to use the knowledge of every colleague to drive us to the future of beauty on the high street, a vision of healthcare on the high street, a way of continuing to be the brand that people across the UK and Ireland rely on for so much.”
He concluded: “We have a ‘Store Centric’ IT strategy, thanks to every member of the team who gave us comments and thoughts, 6,000 data items driving what we should do next and what it will do for our customers.”
“IT knows how to work with our colleagues because it is part of our business not separate to the business.”
