Building the Process Foundations for Enterprise AI at Boots

Meet our customer

Boots UK is the UK’s leading health and beauty retailer, serving customers and patients through more than 1,800 stores nationwide. With over 51,000 team members, Boots combines pharmacy, healthcare and retail services to support millions of customers every day. Founded in 1849, the company has evolved into an integrated healthcare and retail business, helping people manage their health and wellbeing at every stage of life.

Creating a Single Source of Operational Truth

Boots began its ARIS journey as part of a major SAP S/4HANA transformation programme. With no established BPM capability in place, the organisation needed a way to create greater visibility, consistency and control across its operations while supporting large-scale business change.

Using ARIS, Boots created a baseline view of its current operations and developed a connected process architecture linking processes, business objects and supporting documentation. Automated reporting capabilities streamlined process documentation, while integration with JIRA enabled end-to-end traceability between process design and delivery activities.

The result was a shift from process documentation being maintained in disconnected files and presentations to a connected, data-driven business asset that could be shared across teams and functions. Just as importantly, ARIS helped bring business and IT stakeholders together around a common operational view, creating the foundation for a broader BPM and Continuous Improvement capability.

Scaling BPM Across the Enterprise

As the programme matured, ARIS evolved from a transformation tool into a business-wide platform supporting day-to-day operations. Boots expanded its process landscape across Finance, HR, IT, Data & Analytics, Transformation and emerging AI initiatives. Standard process libraries were introduced to improve consistency and reuse, while BPM training was rolled out across the organisation.

Today, Continuous Improvement forms part of employee development plans, helping embed process thinking into the culture of the organisation. This shift has enabled Boots to move from isolated improvement initiatives towards a more systematic approach to operational excellence.

Delivering Measurable New Business Value

The visibility provided by ARIS has already helped Boots identify and implement significant process improvements. One finance process, previously consisting of 220 individual steps, was redesigned and simplified to just 40 steps. The change removed 180 unnecessary activities and reduced process execution time from six hours to one and a half hours – saving 4.5 hours every time the process is performed.

Across the business, process improvements have contributed to cost savings, strengthened compliance, reduced the cost of quality and simplified ways of working. With more than 2,000 detailed processes now documented, Boots has established a comprehensive understanding of how work is performed across the enterprise.

Building the Foundation for AI

Having established visibility and control over its operational landscape, Boots is now focused on the next phase of its transformation journey.The organisation is exploring Process Mining, Process Simulation, workflow orchestration and AI-powered assistants to help move from understanding processes to optimising them in real time.

By strengthening process governance and improving data quality, Boots is creating the conditions required for AI to operate effectively and responsibly across the business.

As Lee Oates, Head of Finance BPM & Continuous Improvement at Boots, explains: “It’s very easy to think that you can just chuck AI in and it can solve all your problems. But if we don’t prepare our foundations, our data and our processes, that’s fundamental.”

With ARIS providing a connected view of processes, data and business operations, Boots is laying the groundwork for a future where AI can be deployed with greater confidence, control and measurable business impact.