Walden Group: Advanced technology for a healthier tomorrow

For over 70 years, Walden Group – an independent and family-owned business – has specialised in distributing healthcare products across Europe. Now, it has expanded beyond that. But healthcare still remains at its core, driving what it does to give it a deep sense of purpose – particularly via Walden Digital.

Denis Connolly has been with Walden Group for seven years, having transferred over as part of the acquisition of Movianto. Walden has successfully grown enormously, both organically and inorganically. It has a culture which absorbs talent, best practices, and great people. “It’s been an interesting journey within Walden,” he says. “There are so many different aspects to Walden, like setting up a digital subsidiary (Walden Digital), undergoing digital transformation, and steering the company through building our own tools and systems as well. We still buy a lot from Microsoft and SAP, but it’s good to have our own capabilities alongside that.”

Walden Digital

The creation of Walden Digital has been a game-changer for the business. Launching a digital subsidiary has enabled much of this impressive development to happen over the last couple of years – and Connolly is firmly at the helm. While he’s the CIO of Walden Group, he’s the CEO of Walden Digital. As a result, he wears two leadership hats in his position. Walden has many different subsidiaries focused on different elements of the organisation. All of them are directly focused on one element of the business, be it transportation, storage, or anything in between.

However, the technology side of the business wasn’t previously considered part of the main business. Eventually, though, the realisation that technology supports all of these areas led to the creation of a standalone digital entity of scale with a huge amount of resources behind it. This meant that Walden Digital could drive the agenda of the whole company independently.?

“We ride the rollercoaster a little bit better as a result. Walden Digital has its own multi-year plan and can do what we need to do without disrupting the wider business to ask for extra resources,” Connolly explains. “We can open up digital centres and invest in R&D and proof of concepts, and can still support Walden Group while having the capacity to innovate, develop, and transform.”

Leveraging data for healthcare

Walden Digital has been really pushing the envelope on the data management side – not just passively managed data, but visualising it for Walden and for its customers. Its data lake is a foundational layer for everything it’s doing, which it worked with Databricks to create. “We’ve really built that data layer that allows us to push on with that capability,” Connolly continues. “So we’ve ingested all our data in a secure way, and now we’re extracting the value and the capabilities of that to drive better performance, better productivity, and better visibility for our customers.”

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