Lloyds Pharmacy has embarked on a project to enable it
to access all the data it holds through a single
application.
The pharmaceutical retailer, which has 1,400 stores, is adapting
a management information tool from MicroStrategy to interrogate the
data held on its legacy systems.
Ian Fereday, the company's head of business intelligence, said,
"The long-term vision is that there should be no data invisibility.
We want to maintain the business legacy system, but provide the key
data on top of that. We realise it will take four or five years to
achieve this."
Lloyds Pharmacy has already used the MicroStrategy 7.5
application to access financial data and key performance
indicators. The company's IT department began developing the
application to produce non-financial KPIs in the second quarter of
this year.
Fereday said, "What we are looking to do is widen the breadth of
information held within the tool. If there is a cost involved, we
ask whether there is a business case around that individual
iteration or phase."
The MicroStrategy application takes daily feeds from Lloyds
Pharmacy's Cedar E5 financial management software and
in-house-developed Epos systems.