Navigating Campaign Complexity in a Competitive Market
As Sweden’s largest private pharmacy chain, Apotek Hjärtat operates over 400 stores alongside a growing e-commerce channel, holding a 32% market share and serving more than four million loyalty members. In a market defined by price competition and frequent promotional activity, effective campaign management is crucial to balancing competitiveness and profitability.
By 2023, it was clear that their promotional operations needed changes because it undermined campaign effectiveness. Campaigns were planned and tracked in more than 150 spreadsheets shared across departments. Each update required manual coordination between marketing, supply chain, and finance, which was a big risk for errors, misalignments, and delays.
Apotek Hjärtat struggled to identify which campaigns were truly successful and why. Teams spent more time on manual data entry and file management than on analyzing promotion effectiveness or developing innovative campaign strategies. The disconnected processes also made cross-functional collaboration difficult. Apotek Hjärtat needed a solution that could unify promotion planning, introduce automation, and enable data-driven decision-making across the entire campaign lifecycle.
Implementing a Unified Promotions Platform
In 2024, Apotek Hjärtat implemented promotions from RELEX, replacing spreadsheets with a single, integrated platform for campaign planning, execution, and analysis. The rollout moved directly to full production without a pilot phase, reflecting both the urgency of the business need and the close collaboration between Apotek Hjärtat and RELEX throughout the project.
Having already implemented RELEX forecasting and replenishment in December 2020, Apotek Hjärtat benefited from a seamless connection to promotions. Planned promotions flow directly from RELEX promotions into forecasting and replenishment, creating a unified data flow across marketing and supply chain. This has fostered better collaboration between promotion planners and supply chain users, reducing repeat work and enabling real-time updates, which has improved operational efficiency.
Throughout the project, Apotek Hjärtat emphasized that one of the greatest values of working with RELEX is the ability to maintain open communication, with RELEX consistently seeking solutions and improvements based on feedback. The partnership continues to evolve, with RELEX playing a significant role in supporting the business and collaborating on new initiatives.
Creating a Single Source of Truth
With promotion planning now centralized in a single system, teams across the organization work from one source of truth for both strategic and tactical campaigns. The integration has also transformed collaboration as marketing teams can develop promotion strategies with confidence that inventory will be available to support campaigns. Supply chain planners can prepare for promotional demand with accurate forecasts whilst finance teams can track promotion performance and ROI in real time rather than waiting for post-campaign reports.
The most immediate impact was the elimination of manual spreadsheets. Previously, promotional planning consumed approximately two workdays and often resulted in additional work for other departments when errors occurred. Today, the process takes about half a day with significantly fewer errors. The elimination of 150 spreadsheets translated to 48 hours saved per promotion cycle with the time now redirected toward campaign analysis and optimization rather than manual data management.
The unified platform reduced errors and improved communication between teams. Late changes or corrections are easier to manage due to improved processes and automatically flow downstream due to a unified platform. While the team continues building new workflows and gradually involving more members to increase efficiency, the foundation for strategic work is in place. The system enables campaign performance analysis and results sharing across the company, even as KPIs and targets continue to be refined.
“RELEX has helped us break down silos so that everyone from category management to marketing and supply chain now works from the same data, improving both accuracy and teamwork,” said Maria Markström, Head of Campaigns, Apotek Hjärtat. “During our recent facial skincare campaign, the RELEX platform was pivotal as all information was consolidated and shared across campaigns, store teams, marketing, and online teams. This 360-degree approach simply was not possible with our old spreadsheet process. We have moved from spending hours maintaining spreadsheets to analyzing what really drives campaign success, which represents a significant step toward data-driven, strategic planning.”
The analytics also empowers category managers with insights for supplier negotiations, allowing more informed decisions on which promotions best align with customer needs and drive sales growth. This capability helps align promotional activities with wider business objectives, enabling evaluation and removal of unprofitable campaigns while ensuring promotions support category roles and customer offering strategies.
Apotek Hjärtat is now positioned to focus on the long-term goal of using the time saved for further strategic work such as campaign optimization and deeper analysis. The foundation of automated planning and data-driven decision-making will enable them to rapidly test new campaign concepts, learn from results, and provide the team with the confidence to pursue additional projects. The transformation from fragmented spreadsheets to a unified promotional platform positions Apotek Hjärtat for continued growth while maintaining operational excellence across its extensive pharmacy network and e-commerce operations.