How Canada’s largest pharmacy retailer trains staff across 1,300+ stores

Business background

Canada’s largest food and pharmacy retailer

Loblaw Companies Limited is Canada’s largest food and pharmacy retailer, operating more than 2,400 corporate, franchise, and Associate-owned locations across the country. Headquartered in Brampton, Ontario, it is one of Canada’s largest food distributors, with multiple shopping formats and product lines to suit different tastes and budgets. Started in 1919, it is now a fourth-generation Canadian grocery chain, aiming to provide affordable food and access to the best in healthcare and wellness to Canadians.

Its pharmacy operations span more than 1,300 stores nationwide.

Business requirement

A private training platform for pharmacy staff, at national scale

Loblaw uses Document360 as a private internal knowledge base that trains their pharmacy staff on how to use their pharmacy management system. They have pharmacy staff spread across 1,300+ stores.

Their knowledge base contains step-by-step guidance on prescription processing, key workflows, best practices, and material for onboarding and training new staff, delivered as a mix of text articles and videos — roughly 75–80% text, with the remainder as video walkthroughs of key workflows.

Because the content supports pharmacy operations, Canadian healthcare data privacy regulations required that it be hosted in a way that met data residency requirements.

Problem with the previous solution

Publishing a documentation update meant a software deployment

Loblaw’s documentation ran on Adobe RoboHelp. RoboHelp is a desktop help-authoring tool that compiles content into static HTML output. That output isn’t published to a website — it has to be pushed as files onto servers sitting in each store. So “publishing” was a software deployment across 1,300+ distributed on-premise environments, a drain on both IT and the content team’s bandwidth, and one that limited updates and new publishes to once a month.

Publishing lag. Updates went out once a month, so pharmacists and assistants waited weeks for updated guidance.

Access constraints. Content was reachable only through the in-store pharmacy system, with no secure external linking, creating an inconsistent and inefficient user experience. This mattered enough to become a major buying criterion.

Search. Ineffective because it depended on manual keyword tagging to prioritise results, meaning users could miss critical information.

No visibility. RoboHelp gave them no reliable stats on how often users were accessing content — which is why usage became their primary success metric on Document360.

Before and after

What changed

Business solution

One platform for authoring and publishing

Loblaw opted to migrate their content to an online knowledge management platform, where content could be authored and published from a single place — removing the export-and-deploy cycle entirely. After evaluating multiple options in the knowledge management space, they chose to host their information on Document360.

Their requirements were specific. The platform had to offer:

• Canadian data residency, to satisfy healthcare privacy regulations
• A fully private knowledge base, with secure access from both inside and outside their pharmacy system
• Support for video alongside text, since a fifth of their content is video walkthroughs
• Search that worked without manual keyword tagging
• Analytics, showing how content was actually being used

Migration

800+ pages, moved with hierarchy and branding intact

Document360’s migration team moved over 800 HTML pages from RoboHelp, along with embedded videos, interlinks, and metadata. The existing content hierarchy and branding were preserved, so authors and readers moved into a familiar structure rather than a rebuilt one. Migration ran against a tight deadline, since the legacy knowledge base was no longer serving its users.

Looking ahead

Usage first, then scale

With the knowledge base now live, Loblaw’s focus turns to measurement. Analytics on users, article views, and top-viewed content give their leadership team visibility into how the platform is being used — something their previous system couldn’t offer. Usage is their primary success metric, and the baseline they establish now becomes the foundation for driving adoption across stores.

That usage picture also shapes their next phase, including identity automation through SCIM provisioning to manage access as the rollout scales.