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Priceline powers its people with PowerApps solution

Priceline powers its people with Power Apps solution

Near real time data improves decisions. customer experience

Australia’s Priceline Pharmacy network has transformed access to data for its Pharmacy Business Leaders – providing them the near real time insights they need to grow the business and improve customer experience.

Priceline has used Microsoft’s Power Apps to build its Heart in Hand app that provides transparency about sales at a consolidated, group or individual store level. The granular detail allows Pharmacy Business Leaders to assess sales, review promotion performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

Pharmacy retail is one of the most competitive markets in Australia; there are almost 4,000 businesses vying for $20 billion of revenue in a market growing at 2.8 per cent a year.

Australian Pharmaceutical Industries is one of the sector’s leading players. It has been in business for 105 years and boasts more than 480 Priceline Pharmacy stores and 970 Soul Pattinson, Pharmacist Advice and Club Premium members.

The Heart In Hand app replaces data collection from multiple reports with an app that can be viewed on any device at any time, with data collected automatically from in store systems. This provides instant insights about sales, average basket size and transactions per hour

According to James Matson, IT retail innovation lead for API, and developer of Heart In Hand, Power Apps and the Microsoft’s Power Platform connector infrastructure made it possible to easily integrate with Azure functions, Azure Table Storage, Bing Maps and existing web APIs.

Instead of the 2-3-month program of work that the app would have taken using more traditional development techniques, Matson was able to deliver the app in just two weeks.

“From only a week or two of prototyping it became apparent that any preconceived notions I had of low-code were about to be blown away,” said Matson.

Besides allowing him to quickly build a highly engaging and compelling presentation layer, the pre-built connectors and integrations allowed the app to link to multiple other systems.

“These integrations might take even a pro developer several days or even weeks to complete, but with the Power Platform, the same functionality can be achieved with a few mouse clicks and some simple code placed in your app,” said Matson

Priceline has recently trialled Click-and-Collect; Power Apps also allowed Priceline to develop and deploy a mobile app – within two days from ideation to launch – to show near real-time metrics of Click-and-Collect data (from the store network). The app provides a view of sales, orders, order statuses (awaiting pick, ready to pick up etc.) as well as Click-and-Collect sales over the previous seven days using a bar chart that takes its context from the gallery control.

Continuous improvement

Steven Worrall, managing director, Microsoft Australia said; “Priceline operates in a highly competed sector – but it is now empowered with near real time data that allows it to make highly informed, evidence-based decisions for individual stores, a franchise group, or the entire network.

“Because the data feedback loop is now so fast the impact of any action can immediately be reviewed, and if required it can be tweaked to get an even better result. Rather than having to wait to compile a report, review a report and then try to make decisions based on that – the Heart in Hand app provides instant insights anywhere.

Pharmacy Business Leaders can see how stores are operating in near real time, and use that to steer conversations with retail store staff.

During promotional events, the users can be on the road, at head office, or in the store and obtain an up-to-the minute view of what products are selling well, by both volume and sales value. The built-in charting ability of Power Apps also lets Pharmacy Business Leaders compare current week with last week performance for an instant measure of progress.