Walgreens 2006 Annual Report Download - page 19

2006 Walgreens Annual Report Page 17
From any home to any
Walgreens to any home
… in one hour.
Walgreens digital photofinishing sales increased
58 percent in 2006. But what took us by surprise
was a recent e-mail from Munich, Germany.
“ Thanks for having online pictures,” wrote our
overseas enthusiast. “ I live in Germany and my
mom lives in North Carolina. She doesn’t have a
computer, so I upload pictures of my child from
my computer to my mom’s local Walgreens,
where she picks them up. That’s how she keeps
up with her grandchild.”
That’s a perfect example of how one family takes
advantage of our digital online services. Modeled
after our pharmacy system, Walgreens.com lets
customers upload photos from their computer for
pickup at any Walgreens in one hour.
Our photo website provides customers with the
earliest pickup time by location and confirms by
e-mail when the order is ready. We also have
agreements with online photo services, including
AOL Pictures, Fuji and Snapfish, to offer their
customers an option of picking up prints at local
Walgreen stores.
Solution: Providing more time
to counsel patients
We use technology to make our
customers’ lives easier and our stores
more efficient. There’s no place this is
more evident than our pharmacies,
where we invested more than $50 million
just in 2006 to provide both the best
patient services and the best workplace
environment in our industry.
We offer seamless pharmacy services at
the counter, on the phone and online,
24 hours a day, anywhere in the country.
These services include automatic refills
of regular prescriptions, e-mailed refill
reminders and multi-language labels.
We’ve taken our technology a major
notch higher to improve patient service
during peak hours. Through workload
balancing, we can digitally spread an
influx of prescription orders among
stores, reducing stress in busy pharma-
cies and improving patient service.
The system automatically evaluates each
on-duty pharmacist’s workload, then
makes a real-time determination of
which store needs help and which can
provide help. This technology ultimately
gives a busy pharmacist more time
to counsel patients while another
pharmacist works behind the scenes.
Solution: Selling ink for less
Walgreens introduced inkjet printer
cartridge refills in April and quickly
rolled out the new service to 1,500
stores. We’re the first national drugstore
chain to offer refills, an environmentally
friendly alternative that saves customers
more than 50 percent on the cost of
replacement cartridges.
People simply bring empty cartridges to
Walgreens photo counters – many open
24 hours a day. Refills are completed
in about 15 minutes. The service is
particularly popular with customers –
including small businesses – who print
large amounts of documents.
Said Chairman Dave Bernauer recently,
“This is a great example of taking
advantage of our convenient locations
to build incremental business. We’re
using existing space and existing
employee coverage to create new
sales and profits.”
Cartridge refills for printers (top) are now
available in 1,500 Walgreen stores, cutting
customer replacement expenses by approximately
50 percent.
A pharmacy with VISION (right) – Our advanced
VISION technology allows pharmacy employees
such as Keiki Taguchi in Roselle, Illinois, to scan
paper prescriptions and store the digital images
in our database.