Boosting operational efficiency in retail

Online grocery shopping is on the rise. However, despite this increase in sales, most supermarkets do not benefit from increasing profits. According to McKinsey: “In online grocery, delivery costs are the biggest hurdle to profitability. It’s a hurdle that can be overcome only with major investments in advanced analytics, warehouse relocation, and automation.” At Google Cloud, we have many tools to help boost this operational efficiency.

Agility and scalability in times of uncertainty
Businesses must keep pace with dramatically changing requirements to survive. To innovate quickly, IT teams need solutions that decrease their time to market while also providing the agility and scalability they need to address any requirement thrown their way. This way, when unpredictable business conditions take over, a decision can be made swiftly since data and scalability options are readily available.  

An inspiring example of a company that effectively uses the Google Cloud Platform to scale up and down as demand changes is Lush. Boxing day is traditionally the UK’s biggest shopping day each year. Large surges in website traffic caused Lush’s website to crash for two consecutive years. To avoid a third outage, Lush migrated its entire global infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform. Not only did this allow Lush to have a Boxing day without any issues, it has also led to a 40% decrease in hosting costs. 

Please take a look at the video below to find out what else Google did for Lush.

Supporting visibility and controllability
Organizations that use data effectively are 19x more likely to be profitable. They are 2.3x more likely to succeed during industry disruptions and 6x more likely to retain customers. Not all businesses have the complete picture of their IT spending in order to make educated decisions about where and how to reduce costs, or whether to reinvest in other strategic areas. To take the guesswork out of optimization and provide robust governance that reduces the risk of overspending, granular visibility and intelligent services are key. 

Google Cloud can help you gain visibility into your spending through intelligent insights into usage and cost drivers, with intuitive billing reports and ‘at a glance’ dashboards of cost trends and forecasts. It can help you organize resources and drive accountability with resource hierarchies and labels that make it simple to allocate costs and understand the ROI of your investment and group resources. By using the GCP and associated resources, like BigQuery, you can effectively support visibility and controllability efforts, making for a very resilient business.

Please take a look at the video below to learn more about how Google supports visibility:

Transforming the way teams work together
Operational efficiency is more than only cloud migration; teams need to be able to work together seamlessly as well. Especially in these days where remote working has become the standard. Google Cloud offers G Suite, a cloud-based productivity solution that includes video meetings, group chat, and document collaboration. 

How does that translate into tangible financial results? Companies that started using G Suite show a 1.5% increase in revenue solely driven by G Suite and 171 hours saved per user per year. G Suite reduces the risk of a data breach by over 95% and leads to a 20% reduction of on-demand tech support. 

There is more
This is just a sneak peek of what Google Cloud can do for you to improve operational efficiency. Interested in reading more? Please continue reading our dedicated operational efficiency whitepaper.