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Walgreens' Journey To Creating an End-to-End Search Platform

Elastic Co
March 09, 2017

Walgreens' Journey To Creating an End-to-End Search Platform

Walgreens is on a journey towards creating an end-to-end search platform for its website powered by Elasticsearch. In this talk, Syed will walk through the various steps along the way, including a look at why their old Endeca-based search platform was no longer viable, how and why Elasticsearch became their new engine, and the technical and architectural lessons and successes they learned along the way.

You’ll also hear how Walgreens continues to expand its use of Elasticsearch to the Elastic Stack and X-Pack to power log management and analysis, including the use of Kibana to visualize technical and business metrics.

Syed Ali l Senior Technical Architect l Walgreens

Elastic Co

March 09, 2017
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Transcript

  1. 2 Agenda ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. Introduction Why

    we did what we did? Relevancy Tuning Walgreens Search Platform Cloud Native Deployment Wrap Up
  2. 3 Walgreens – Championing everyone's right to be happy and

    healthy • One of the largest drugstore chains in the U.S., with more than 8,000 stores • In 2014, Walgreens combined with Alliance Boots to establish Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., forging the first global pharmacy-led, health and wellbeing enterprise. • Walgreens is today part of the Retail Pharmacy USA division of Walgreens Boots Alliance. • Three core strategies: ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. o Offer ultimate convenience o Earn customer loyalty o Deliver extraordinary customer and patient care
  3. 4 Omni channel at Walgreens – Bridging the gap between

    the Clicks to the Bricks ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
  4. ©2014 Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary information.

    For internal use only. 5 We drove billions of dollars of value through our app 5 Time Award Winner 2012 2013, 2014, 2015
  5. 6 Let’s set the context here – Application Search driven

    by the same APIs across different breakpoints ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
  6. 7 What we learnt from our customers about their site

    search experience? • Incorrect results • Irrelevant products • High bounce rate • Waste of time • Too slow ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. Similar To Store Shelves, Customers Will Not Dig To Find What They Are Looking For
  7. 8 Gaps, Challenges and Limitations we encountered… • Black box

    and vendor dependent • Lack of flexibility with analyzers and scoring • No support for relevancy tuning • Unable to integration with ML data • Not scalable • Release cycle dependency • Lack of data quality ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
  8. 9 Core capabilities of Elasticsearch and the flexibility to tailor

    per our needs • 100% open source – no enterprise edition • Wide range of built in analyzer and custom analyzer • Different analyzers for different queries • Apply analyzers on individual attributes • Custom scoring based on function score • Boost and bury based on weightages • Faster Partial updates and near real time search • Multi search ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
  9. 10 Relevancy Manager – Let’s us tune and adjust for

    optimal results • Ability to tune and change queries in real time • Ability to A/B test different search configuration • No dependency on code release cycle • Ability to inject personalized data • Modify search attributes and weightages • Boost and bury on the fly • Geo targeted and segmentation capabilities ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
  10. 11 Elasticsearch Cluster Database File System Message Q Hadoop Log

    Aggregation and End to End Monitoring Operation and Business Metrics Visualization Security Source Ingest Consume Core Search API Product Search API Customer Search API Relevancy Tuning API Sensors Automated On-perm or Cloud Deployment Ingestion Framework Logstash Bulk API Base Templates Analyzers Discovery Plugins Data Nodes Master Nodes Client Nodes Security customers partners internal users Relevancy Manager Portal Store Search API Walgreens Elastic Search Platform IOTs
  11. 12 Built on Cloud Native Application Architecture ©[2017] Walgreen Co.

    All rights reserved. Micro service app Relevancy App Micro service app • Multi tenant • Active/Active deployment • Deploy at will • Auto scale • Fault tolerant
  12. 13 Log aggregation and monitoring cluster based on Elastic Stack

    ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. Micro service app
  13. 14 Wrapping up ©[2017] Walgreen Co. All rights reserved. ü

    Increase in CSAT score ü Increase in conversion and revenue ü Performance improved 4x ü Drastic decrease in error rate ü Easy correlation of log and metric data