Walgreens Drives Savings Across 9,000+ Locations with Healthcare Workflow Automations

The Company Profile: Walgreens

Walgreens, founded in 1901, is one of the largest community retail pharmacy companies in the United States, with approximately 8,000 locations across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Walgreens employs approximately 211,000 team members, including nearly 90,000 healthcare service providers, and serves approximately 9 million customers and patients each day.

Walgreens provides prescription pharmacy services, immunizations, health screenings and clinical services alongside health, wellness, beauty, personal care and everyday retail products. Its services extend beyond its physical stores through home delivery, digital prescription management, virtual healthcare and specialty pharmacy services, creating an integrated network of in-person and digital healthcare access.

Prior to becoming a private standalone company in August 2025, Walgreens was reported within Walgreens Boots Alliance's U.S. Retail Pharmacy segment. That segment generated $91.96 billion in sales during the first nine months of fiscal 2025, including $30.7 billion in the third quarter alone.

With a nationwide footprint, hundreds of thousands of team members and millions of daily customer interactions, Walgreens operates at a scale that requires highly coordinated operational systems across its store network and maintaining consistent store standards, supporting regulatory and pharmacy compliance, coordinating a large workforce, and delivering a reliable customer experience across thousands of locations create significant operational complexity.

Effective systems and processes are therefore essential to providing Walgreens with visibility, consistency and control across its nationwide operations.

The Challenges

In an increasingly competitive and rapidly evolving healthcare and retail environment, the organization needed to continuously modernize and maintain its network of more than 9,000 locations. Store updates, repairs, and fixture replacements—such as gondolas, shelving, and lighting—required coordination between project managers, store managers, vendors, and centralized operations teams.

At the time, the company relied on a manual process for submitting and managing store service requests. Project managers completed physical request forms, uploaded them to the company’s internal portal, and then submitted them via email to the Store Touch Request (STR) Team. The STR Team reviewed each submission and manually re-entered the data into their internal tracking system.

This multi-step, paper-based workflow created several operational challenges:

Time-consuming request submission and duplication
Increased risk of human error and data inconsistencies
Delays in request processing and vendor coordination
Limited visibility into request status and tracking

Compounding the issue, the company’s internal portal—used by project and store managers to access and submit requests—was scheduled for deactivation. Without a replacement solution, the organization faced a significant operational gap in how store maintenance and improvement requests would be initiated and managed.

Leadership required a modern, centralized, and automated service request management system capable of streamlining workflows, reducing manual intervention, improving accuracy, and ensuring uninterrupted operational support across thousands of retail locations.

The Solutions

Recognizing the urgency and operational risk created by the manual request process, Quandary Consulting Group designed and implemented a centralized store service request management system built on Quickbase. The solution created a connected digital workflow for capturing requests, communicating with requesters, managing approvals, and transferring approved information into the STR Team's primary operational application—eliminating many of the manual handoffs that had previously slowed the process.

Creating a Secure Quickbase Request Portal for Store Teams

Quandary worked closely with the Store Touch Request (STR) Team to develop an intuitive external-facing Quickbase portal where store and project managers across the organization could submit maintenance and fixture requests. The portal provided a standardized digital experience for capturing the information the STR Team needed while remaining accessible to employees who were not full Quickbase users. Using Quickbase's Everyone on the Internet (EOTI) functionality, authorized requesters could securely interact with the submission process without requiring individual Quickbase licenses.

The new environment helped the organization:

Replace paper forms and email-driven request intake
Standardize the information collected for each request
Reduce duplicate and incomplete submissions
Make request submission accessible across 9,000+ retail locations
Maintain corporate security and governance requirements
Give the STR Team a centralized starting point for managing incoming work

Instead of requests arriving through disconnected channels, store and project managers could initiate work through one consistent digital process.

Automating Request Intake, Review, and Communication

Quandary also automated what happened after a request was submitted. New submissions automatically generated notifications for the STR Team through its shared Microsoft Outlook inbox, giving employees immediate visibility into incoming requests. Team members could then review and approve the request directly within Quickbase. If information was incomplete or additional details were required, Quickbase notifications automatically communicated the request back to the appropriate user, creating a more structured feedback loop without requiring STR employees to manually manage every follow-up.

This gave the STR Team a more consistent process for moving requests from initial submission toward fulfillment while improving visibility into where each request stood; the new workflow became: Request Submitted → STR Team Notified → Request Reviewed → Additional Information Requested if Needed → Approval → Downstream Processing

Connecting Approved Requests With the Core Quickbase Application

Approval wasn't the end of the automation, once a request was approved, webhooks and Quickbase automation transferred the relevant information into the STR Team's primary Quickbase application, mapping request data into the environment employees used to manage downstream activity.

This eliminated another significant manual handoff, so instead of employees reviewing an approved request and then recreating the same information in another system, data could move automatically from request intake to the operational application responsible for fulfillment.

The resulting architecture connected: Store or Project Manager → Quickbase Request Portal → STR Review & Approval → Automated Data Transfer → Core Quickbase Application → Service Fulfillment

Creating a Scalable Service Request Process Across 9,000+ Retail Locations

Through the combined use of Quickbase, automated notifications, webhooks, and structured approval workflows, the organization replaced a fragmented paper- and email-based process with a centralized digital service request environment. Quickbase became more than a place to store requests, it provided the workflow infrastructure connecting requesters, STR employees, approvals, communications, and downstream service management and for an organization supporting more than 9,000 retail locations, that scalability was critical. The solution created a repeatable process capable of handling requests across a large distributed footprint while reducing duplicate data entry, improving information accuracy, strengthening governance, and helping the STR Team move requests toward fulfillment more efficiently.

The Results

A Scalable Service Request Model Supporting 9,000+ Retail Locations

The implementation of the Quickbase-powered store service request management system transformed how the organization captured, reviewed, approved, and processed maintenance and fixture requests across its nationwide retail footprint.

Which meant that instead of relying on paper forms, email communication, duplicate data entry, and disconnected tracking processes, store and project managers gained a single digital entry point for submitting requests, while the STR Team gained a centralized workflow for managing them through approval and fulfillment and the result was a more efficient and scalable service request lifecycle: Request Submitted → Automated Notification → STR Review → Approval → Automated Data Transfer → Core Quickbase Application → Fulfillment

At Least One Hour of Manual Processing Eliminated Each Day; 7 Hours Per Week Given Back to Employees

Automation reduced the administrative effort required to process incoming requests by eliminating repetitive data entry and unnecessary workflow steps and the new process saved approximately one hour of workflow processing time per day, particularly across request submission, review, duplication, and downstream data transfer.

Over the course of a standard working year, that represents approximately 250 hours of administrative processing capacity returned to the team—time employees could redirect toward managing and fulfilling requests rather than manually moving information between processes.

Eliminating Duplicate Data Entry With Quickbase Automation

One of the most immediate improvements came from connecting the external request application directly with the STR Team's primary Quickbase environment and once requests were reviewed and approved, relevant information could automatically move into the core application through webhooks and Quickbase automation. Employees no longer needed to manually recreate approved requests in another system.

This helped reduce:

Duplicate data entry and administrative rework
Human error caused by manually transferring request information
Delays between request approval and downstream processing
Inconsistent information across applications
Time spent managing requests through email and paper-based processes

Expanding Request Access Without Expanding Quickbase Licensing

The external request portal also solved an important scalability challenge. Using Quickbase's Everyone on the Internet (EOTI) functionality allowed the organization to extend appropriate request-submission capabilities to store and project managers without requiring every requester to become a licensed Quickbase user and this gave the organization a scalable way to support request intake across more than 9,000 retail locations while maintaining greater control over Quickbase licensing and system access.

Greater Visibility and Control Across the Request Lifecycle

Centralizing the process also gave the STR Team a more consistent view of incoming requests and their progression through the workflow and instead of requests being distributed across paper forms, inboxes, and separate tracking processes, information could be captured within a structured environment where employees could review requests, request additional information, approve work, and move validated data into downstream workflows.

The Key Results Delivered:

Approximately one hour of workflow processing time saved per day
Approximately 250 hours of administrative capacity recovered annually
9,000+ retail locations supported through a scalable digital request process
Duplicate request entry significantly reduced through automated data transfer
Centralized request submission, review, and approval within Quickbase
Expanded external access without requiring full Quickbase licenses for every requester
Reduced manual errors and administrative rework
Improved visibility from initial request through downstream fulfillment

By combining Quickbase, external request functionality, workflow automation, notifications, and webhooks, the organization transformed a manual service request process into a scalable digital workflow capable of supporting thousands of locations and the result wasn't simply faster request processing. It was a stronger operational model that allowed the organization to support a massive retail footprint without requiring administrative effort to scale at the same rate as request volume.

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