Simon Prinn of Walgreens Boots Alliance has done his fair share of project and teamwork. He and his team have worked with other stakeholders around the world on projects of strategic importance for the pharmacy, health and wellbeing organisation. He discussed the success of these projects, the relevance of his team to company strategy as well as tips for working productively across borders at DataIQ Summit.
As senior manager, Simon Prinn heads up the strategic data operations team at Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), having joined Boots 21 years ago.
WBA is a multinational organisation comprising Walgreens in the US, Boots, headquartered in the UK and with a presence in eight countries, and Swiss-based Alliance Healthcare which has over 300 distribution centres around the world.
With such an extensive global footprint, Prinn and his team are pulling in data from the UK, Mexico, Chile, Norway, Thailand, the US, China and South Korea. They turn that data into tools, reporting and data products that support things like strategy, mergers and acquisitions, geospatial, space and range, and trial design and analytics.
Prinn explained geospatial relates to the location of the shops, space and range is all about how the shops are laid out and how much space is given over to different product categories. Trial design and analytics is about testing the ideas that are suggested by different people in the business.
“Work with the person with the ‘I love spreadsheets’ cup.”
Doing this kind of work across different countries involves a lot of teamwork and collaboration but Prinn’s team have a knack for finding the best people work with. “When we go to a new market for the first time and we are talking to a bunch of analysts, we are looking for the person who has got the ‘I love spreadsheets’ cup, because they are the one who is really going to help us out.”
One project began 14 months ago when Prinn and his team were asked to create the first ever full customer transaction dataset for Chinese medical distribution and logistics business GuoDa Sinopharm with which WBA had gone into a joint venture. “They had all these allocations in China and we had a load of retail experience and with that came retail analytics expertise. We could wow them with our analytics expertise and get it done quickly,” said Prinn.
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