By Andy McCue, 25 April 2007 11:14
INTERVIEW
Health and beauty chain Boots has become one of the most familiar names on UK high streets - a long way from the small herbal remedy shop it started out as under Sir Jesse Boot back in 1871.
More recently the company has been facing fierce competition from the big supermarkets eating into its core toiletries and drugs market but, having bounced back with a £7bn merger with Alliance Unichem last year, the Alliance Boots group is currently the subject of a high-profile £11bn tug-of-war bidding battle between two private equity groups.
At Boots' sprawling headquarters campus a short journey off the M1 in Nottingham IT director Rob Fraser is, unsurprisingly, reluctant to talk about the private equity takeover bids and turns the subject instead to the role technology has played in the recent modernisation and turnaround at Boots.
He says: "Retailers are not massive spenders on IT and yet IT is enormously critical to what we do. The thing that I find really exciting about retail IT is that you don't get a massive amount of money but you can make an enormous difference with the right value-added application."
Coming from an engineering background at university, Fraser joined Boots about 10 years ago as a programme manager, following stints at Marks & Spencer and Arthur Andersen. After rising to IT director for the retail business, and with some big business process and supply chain projects under his belt, he took over group IT responsibility when the previous incumbent, David Lister, headed off to become CIO at Reuters in 2004.
Fraser came to the group IT role towards the end of a three-and-a-half year £300m programme to overhaul Boots' IT infrastructure. During that period the company upped its new IT investment from around £25m to £100m per year.
"Since 2001 we've pretty much gone out and touched every piece of IT in the organisation. So for every year of the transformation we were spending four years' worth of IT money," he explains.
About two-thirds of that total investment - just over £200m - went into the in-store IT infrastructure, which includes a new pharmacy system that will link to the NHS' e-prescription service, 15,000 new touchscreen tills to replace the 17-year-old units in the shops, chip and PIN, a new store-wide network, and a role-based web portal that allows staff to access back-office applications and information relevant to their jobs.
The engine behind the portal also crunches a vast amount of store data and management information tailored to each store, based on its location and benchmarked against a group of similar stores, to provide what Fraser calls the "manager's five minute view".
"It's our best summary of 'if you were only going to do one thing today, come to this screen and that will give you all the big things we think you should be taking action on in your store today'," says Fraser.
A quarter of the £300m was spent on Boots' SAP platform, including SAP's retail, financials, property, treasury and procurement modules.
"We're just about to complete the last phase of work, which will bring us some supply chain work, so we'll have our complete SAP footprint," says Fraser.
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