Pharmacy to unite data in single app

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.