Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
HIGHLIGHTS
- Apoteket modernised its legacy IT environment to build a simpler, more scalable digital foundation that can support growing healthcare demands across physical and digital channels.
- By adopting a unified hyperconverged infrastructure model, Apoteket improved operational agility, reduced infrastructure complexity, and gained better cost predictability while enabling faster service delivery.
- The transformation strengthened customer experience through more reliable pharmacy services, faster responsiveness, and a consistent omnichannel healthcare journey during critical moments of care.
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Planning for growth
Apoteket, one of Sweden’s leading pharmacy retailers, plays a critical role in the country’s healthcare ecosystem, serving millions of customers through its nationwide network of pharmacies and digital channels. With healthcare becoming increasingly connected and customer expectations continuing to rise, there was a need for a stronger, more agile technology foundation to ensure the delivery of reliable and seamless experiences across every customer touchpoint.
What began as an infrastructure modernisation initiative quickly evolved into a broader business transformation effort. Apoteket aimed to create a digital foundation that would support scalable growth, faster responsiveness, and consistently reliable healthcare services while reinforcing customer trust.
Apoteket
The legacy challenge
It was increasingly difficult to scale and manage Apoteket’s existing IT environment, built on legacy virtualisation platforms. This was impacting pharmacy services for end customers.
The impact was not limited to IT operations alone. In a healthcare-driven environment where responsiveness and consistency directly influence customer trust, the limitations of the existing infrastructure began to affect service delivery across both physical pharmacies and digital channels. Supporting growing demand while maintaining a seamless customer experience was becoming increasingly challenging.
As the business expanded, these challenges began to impact agility. Provisioning new environments, deploying updates, and scaling services often required significant coordination and manual effort, slowing the organisation’s ability to respond quickly to evolving business needs. Additionally, rising and unpredictable licensing costs created uncertainty in long-term financial planning, while the dependence on multiple infrastructure and management tools added operational complexity across the environment.
Apoteket recognised the need for a simpler, more scalable operating model that could reduce complexity, improve resilience, and better align technology with long-term business priorities.
Kamran Chohan
CIO Apoteket
With TCS, we’ve built a future-ready foundation - one that not only supports us today but prepares us for what comes next. We’re also in a better position to support Sweden’s healthcare system - now and in future. Ultimately, this transformation allows us to serve our customers better with faster access, more reliable services, and a stronger foundation for innovation in healthcare."
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Transformation roadmap
TCS partnered with Apoteket to help modernise its IT landscape and build a more resilient and future-ready digital foundation.
The engagement started with a collaborative assessment focused on identifying operational bottlenecks, aligning transformation priorities, and defining a migration roadmap that minimised business risk and ensured continuity of critical services.
The transformation was executed through a phased approach that included pilot validation, controlled workload migration, and ongoing performance optimisation. This helped reduce disruption while enabling a smoother transition to the new operating model.
At the centre of the transformation was the adoption of a hyperconverged infrastructure model that unified compute, storage, and virtualisation into a single integrated platform. By simplifying the technology landscape and reducing dependencies across multiple tools, Apoteket streamlined operations and created a more flexible environment that supports future business growth. A key strength of the engagement was the co-creation model. TCS worked closely with Apoteket teams throughout the transformation journey, enabling stronger alignment, effective knowledge transfer, and shared ownership across the organisation. This collaborative approach helped ensure that the transformation delivered sustainable outcomes beyond the initial implementation phase.
More than a technology refresh, the initiative marked a shift toward a business-aligned operating model designed to help Apoteket scale, innovate, and adapt with greater confidence.
Better pharmacy services
The transformation delivered measurable improvements across operational efficiency, cost optimisation, and business agility.
Apoteket significantly improved the speed of provisioning and responsiveness to evolving business needs, enabling faster rollout of services and enhancements across the organisation. Simplified operations also reduced administrative overhead, allowing IT teams to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time driving innovation.
Apoteket additionally gained greater cost visibility and predictability, helping address earlier concerns around licensing volatility and infrastructure-related overheads.
In addition, the new platform strengthened scalability and resilience, positioning Apoteket to support growing demand, expand digital capabilities, and respond more effectively to evolving healthcare needs.
Most importantly, the transformation had a meaningful impact on the end customers. Faster access to prescriptions and pharmacy support, more reliable service delivery, and a more consistent omnichannel experience helped strengthen trust during critical healthcare interactions.
By moving beyond infrastructure management and focusing on business enablement, Apoteket has established a modern digital foundation that supports continuous innovation, long-term growth, and improved healthcare outcomes.