Stimulating the acceleration of innovations in grocery retail

As the pace of change continues to increase, especially during these challenging times, innovation is more crucial than ever. Some retailers have embraced this accelerated transformative pace that is powered by innovative technologies and the urge to satisfy the needs of demanding customers. This shift in the increasing pace of change has triggered an urgent embrace of technology and innovation. At Google Cloud, we are here to help.

Cultural partnerships
Since 1998, a lot has changed. Google has grown from a garage start-up to a large and complex organization. But some things remain the same - a strategy focused on innovation, where smart people are excited by the same vision, and where transparency and data trump speculation and politics.

At Google we love to help accelerate business growth by combining Google’s cloud technologies and internal expertise in crafting a culture of curiosity and creation to identify new opportunities and act quickly to get ahead of the competition. Partnering with Google gives organizations access to our experience in creating a culture that fosters innovation where we help them to manage change across a variety of tenets that make up a successful culture.

Next generation analytical tools
Google Cloud not only offers the ability to store your data, it can also help to gain insights using a complete suite of analytics and machine learning tools. It offers an integrated and serverless data analytics platform for workloads of any size or complexity, providing benefits quicker than solely building capabilities and expertise on-premise. Many clients use data analytics tools to query client data, including unstructured information. Google Cloud is there to support C-Suite executives’ search for ways to keep operations lean and to gain a competitive advantage by becoming smarter about new technologies such as cloud, APIs, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

Carrefour is an example of a company that effectively uses Google Cloud Platform to ensure that it delivers the same high quality service whichever channel the customer uses. The company has been using SAP on Google Cloud to build an infrastructure optimized for customer service. It now has the capacity and power to collate, analyze and act on more than 2,000 data streams in real-time. Please take a look at the video below to find out about what else Google did for Carrefour:

Time and talent management 
Solving technological challenges isn’t usually the core of your business. However, the effort to support infrastructure and application management can be a serious burden to growth, as a significant share of resources is used to keep pace with the competition, let alone be one step ahead. Moreover, internally built systems and heavily customized vendor technology often rely on IT staff with a deep understanding of the system architecture and technology environment, bringing a significant key person risk. By moving to the cloud, IT and business teams can instead focus their efforts on building new products and tools to support current and future customer requirements. In addition, Google Cloud software allows talent to work with modern technologies and to work in a modern, open, and collaborative environment. 

A company that struggled with an over-complicated setup of its business intelligence (BI) platform is Coolblue. The actionable insights team needed an integrated platform that could handle data from all kinds of sources, incorporate streaming, run in real-time and enable sophisticated data analysis. Because of the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of a fully managed solution, they chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which helps them to stream real-time data. This has resulted in an increased processing speed and opened up a whole new set of possibilities for data-driven features. But above all, GCP has saved Coolblue’s actionable insights team valuable time while keeping them on the cutting edge.  

Want to know more?
Interested to learn more about how Google’s retail-oriented cloud services can stimulate innovations? Please visit Google Cloud: How retailers are innovating for the “new normal” of the future for more information.