National Pharmacies improves customer engagement with migration to Oracle® Cloud

Established in 1911, National Pharmacies operates more than 40 pharmacies and 20 optical stores in the South Australia region. To better serve its 300,000 members, the company embarked on a digital transformation strategy focused on updating its technology to meet shifting customer challenges of better engagement through mobile and social channels.

With help from DXC Technology, the company consolidated enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and moved them to the cloud, resulting in many benefits, including the ability to target consumers with personalised special offers.

Challenge

Looking to maintain its 100-plus-year legacy of helping consumers in South Australia improve their health, National Pharmacies was looking for technology improvements that would drive innovation and allow better engagement with its customers.

Ryan Klose, general manager of corporate services for National Pharmacies, says to do so, the retailer needed to become a better innovator, and deliver technologies fast and at a low cost. “Many of our consumers are using mobiles today, whether they’re purchasing or talking about what they’ve purchased or what they’re going to purchase next,” Klose says. “Our technology had to change to compete.”

Solution

Seeking an IT services organisation with extensive experience in Oracle technology and the retail industry, National Pharmacies selected DXC Red Rock to support the transformation. DXC Red Rock is the largest independent provider of Oracle consulting and managed services in Australia and New Zealand.

By consolidating ERP applications and putting them into the cloud, National Pharmacies can more easily develop consumer-friendly applications and services, while engaging with customers in a more consistent manner.

In addition to moving applications to the cloud, a key to enabling improved consumer engagement was a major upgrade of National Pharmacies’ back-end business processes and planning systems. Using Oracle technology, the retailer created a library of standard business processes and practices that could be easily accessed.

Another key to the transformation was DXC’s introduction of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 in the Oracle Cloud.

Result

Not only has re-using standard processes made functions such as fulfilling customer orders more efficient, but it has helped the company streamline overall business operations.

Among many benefits, the new applications platform allows for better integration with employee and customer mobile devices. For example, pharmacy employees can use an iPad tablet to enter stock orders, and managers can approve those orders in real time.

With the transformation, National Pharmacies became the first customer transitioned to Oracle’s Australian data centre for cloud infrastructure.

Innovation serves as the centrepiece of National Pharmacies’ strategic plan, Klose says. “We see innovation as a disruptor with our competitors, and also with our consumers to get their attention.” Klose says he sees the transformation project as a catalyst for change in the company’s business strategy. “It’s allowed us to rewrite our next few years so we can now really target consumers. Making it easy for our consumer is our primary goal.”

An important success factor was the highly collaborative relationship National Pharmacies built with DXC. Klose says, “DXC is now a trusted partner. We whiteboard ideas together, and we take those ideas together and form action plans to deliver projects in the same way we delivered our initial project.” Going forward, Klose wants to keep the relationship going. “We would love to continue to leverage DXC with their global footprint, their innovation that they brought to our project, and use that innovation in future projects and future challenges that we have.”

Read the full case study.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.