Meet The Team: William Wilson

Introduction. 

I'm William Wilson, Data Architect here at RWA Pharmacy. 

In practice, my role is about how we capture dispensing and operational data from our pharmacy customers' systems, and then deciding what insight it can give our customers. It's also about how we store it, so that it can be structured and modelled in a way that's efficient for the team turning it into the reports and dashboards our customers rely on. 

That's especially true whenever we're bringing a new pharmacy management system integration on board or looking at new data feeds coming into the business. I'm the one thinking through how it fits into our existing data architecture, what new insight it could unlock for pharmacies, and how that translates into a reliable process. 

Understanding what our pharmacy customers are actually trying to achieve is one of the most important parts of my job because it's what drives every decision about getting their data right. The biggest thing, day in and day out, is making sure that when a pharmacy opens at eight in the morning, the dispensing and stock information in front of them is accurate. That way, they can make operational decisions straight away, rather than waiting on us. 

How I got here. 

Leaving school, I knew I wanted to do something technical, but I didn't have a clear idea of exactly what. So, I took a general engineering course at Trinity College, before specialising in computer engineering. It was the logical side of it, and the focus on patterns within data, that really pulled me in. 

After graduating, I spent a short time on Cisco’s help desk. It confirmed to me that I wanted to build systems rather than support them and ultimately led me to RWA. 

My day to day. 

The first few hours of most days are operational: making sure every data feed from our pharmacy systems is running as it should, and that anything outstanding is being chased or communicated with the relevant supplier or system provider. 

I lead a team of two, Rory and Israel, and we stay in close contact throughout the day as I direct where our attention needs to go. The structure within the team is deliberately flat, so a good idea carries weight regardless of who it comes from. 

That approach goes right back to when I started.  

I've sat in rooms with highly experienced people working through a complex data modelling problem, where it's someone earlier in their career who spots the detail everyone else has overlooked. It taught me early on how easy it is to lose sight of the bigger picture when you're only looking at pharmacy data from one angle. 

Having a team that brings different perspectives isn't a nice-to-have, it's essential, because there are so many ways to approach a problem, and just as many ways to miss something important without a range of views in the room. It's also why we encourage an open culture within the team, where every question is worth asking, however obvious it might seem, because the most straightforward questions are often the ones that uncover something everyone else has missed. 

Once the operational side of the day is under control, the rest of my time is split between what we're building for the future of our pharmacy data architecture and supporting the wider pharmacy team with the day-to-day integration queries and challenges that come our way. 

How my role benefits customers. 

Most of our pharmacy customers are working across several different systems, from dispensing platforms to accounts software, trying to find the data they need. 

That's where I come in most: bringing all of that together and making it look simple at the other end, which is always the hard part. 

Alongside that, maintaining the systems, the processes and the data pipelines that keep pharmacy operations running is one of the bigger challenges of the job, as is working with the people involved along the way. But it's a weight taken off our customers' shoulders, and it's worth doing properly. 

Whatever good work comes out of it is always down to being part of a strong team, not any one person. 

A project I'm proud of. 

A little while back, we worked on an integration for a large pharmacy business that also runs a significant number of care homes. 

Every month, they were dispensing thousands of prescriptions across their care home business. The billing side of that, reconciling dispensing data for invoicing, had become a real headache for them. They came to us knowing we already held all their transaction data and asked whether we could help connect that with the accounts system they used for invoicing their care home clients. 

We built what was essentially a data pipeline for them. 

It took the dispensing and transaction data we'd gathered from across their systems, put it into the right format, and sent it over to their accounts system every month. They'd been processing somewhere between four and five thousand invoices a month, and before this it had been a largely manual, quite stressful process, simply because accuracy mattered so much. Once the pipeline was in place, their data entry was right first time, and the whole team could see it.  

Any discrepancies were highlighted rather than discovered too late, which gave them real confidence that their invoicing was correct. 

The person I dealt with most closely on this was also the person most affected by that monthly process, and the response was extremely positive: it freed up a significant amount of his time and removed much of the pressure that came with getting the figures right every month. 

Seeing that level of impact is one of the most rewarding parts of this job. 

Get in touch. 

If you'd like to find out more about RWA Pharmacy and how our data integration and pharmacy business intelligence solutions could work for you, get in touch with the team today.