Google Cloud Partners driving Retail and Commerce Innovation

With strains on the supply chain and other pandemic-driven economic challenges intensifying, retailers this year face some of their biggest mandates to date: Increasing operational efficiency, delivering a seamless online and in-store experience, and staying one step ahead of rapidly changing customer preferences while offering exceptional customer service. This is why Google’s internal media teams continuously monitor and analyze the retail market and innovate with their services partners. Their goal is to help business leaders maximize business outcomes in this new landscape.

All of these challenges require business leaders to precisely balance investments in pricing, promotion, product assortment, technology, and in-store experiences. The good news is these same leaders know intuitively that cloud technology can help. And with the help of a trusted partner who has the necessary technical knowledge and business experience, they can put the right plan in place to move forward and win.

Let me show you how some of our Google Cloud partners and customers are solving real-world retail and commence business challenges.

Air Asia accelerating forecasting, budgeting and increasing agility 

Faster budgeting and forecasting enabled Air Asia's BIG Rewards' leadership team to transition the business from survival mode during the pandemic, to more long-term program stability looking forward. BIG Rewards partnered with Searce to innovate and quickly implement a solution with improved speed and accuracy that democratizes data to better serve the business and empower all users to create relevant reports for decision-making. With Connected Sheets, BIG Rewards employees can analyze and report on large volumes of data through a familiar Sheets interface, accelerating decision-making and enabling the business to become more agile and relevant to a fast-changing market.

“With the Google Cloud and Google Workspace solution, we expect to reduce the time to complete budgets from up to three months to just two to three weeks and lower the time to undertake quarterly forecasts from one month to one to two weeks.”—Sereen Teoh, Chief Financial Officer, BIG Rewards

Well-designed experiments delivering measurable ROI for American Eagle Outfitters

American Eagle Outfitters conducts store experiments on their key initiatives before scale-up by leveraging Google Cloud data, machine learning capabilities and Accenture's retail data science expertise to remain quick and agile. From concept to production and deployment in four months, American Eagle Outfitters saved millions of dollars in savings through store testing and a cost-effective platform, and provided the ability to understand performance of in-store tests at a granular level across multiple metrics. Their centralized data store for transactions, inventory, and web data is used for multiple solutions without compromising on performance, and leads to accelerated solution development.  

“BigQuery gave us the scalability and processing power to analyze massive datasets that were previously too hard to manage in our old systems.”—Jimmy Hunkele, Director of Data Analytics, American Eagle Outfitters

Uniting top retail brand, Unify, onto one collaboration platform

With the help of Devoteam, Unify successfully brought the companies behind France’s top digital media brands together onto one communications platform in just two months. Despite the COVID-19 lockdown, the migration helped improve the speed of collaboration by reducing the dependence on email using Google Meet and Google Sheets. By installing a single communications solution for multiple companies, the team reaps the rewards of a shared CRM system to illuminate new synergies and enable remote change management using face-to-face interaction. The migration transforms working norms by enabling remote collaboration between brands with tools that create harmony and support customer experiences.

“Google Workspace is more intuitive than other solutions and simplifies large account migrations with automated processes. The question was never ‘Which system should we use?’ but always ‘How can we bring everyone to Google Workspace?”—Charles Misson, Manager of Corporate IT, Unify

Cultivating a vision at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.

To best manage all the eCommerce environments associated with its family of brands and ensure outstanding customer service, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has been working with MongoDB and Google Cloud to revolutionize its DevOps culture. As organizations modernize IT, MongoDB encourages DevOps professionals to place more importance on understanding customers, driving business values, and taking a people-first approach to work. By encouraging experimentation and innovation, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., opens up new possibilities for software and infrastructure together. As a result, their DevOps team is able to act independently and bolster performance as demand fluctuates due to turbulent external factors across the retail marketplace.

“From agility in scaling and improved resource management to seamless global clusters and premium monitoring, MongoDB and Google Cloud reduce complexity and allow our teams to stay lean and focused on innovation rather than infrastructure.”—Chief Technology Officer, Abi Sachdeva

Partner specializations create unique opportunities for retailers

These four examples show that Google Cloud, along with its services partners, helps retailers achieve their digital transformation goals with intelligent, data-driven solutions that are extended by our ecosystem of partners. One of the beauties of working with a partner is the instant access to expertise and experience necessary to align challenges with solutions and aspirations with reality. 

We continue to add thousands of people across Google Cloud to ensure our partners and customers receive all the support needed to thrive and win. Looking for a solution focused partner in your region who has achieved Expertise and/or Specialization in your industry? Search our Global Partner Directory. Not yet a Google Cloud partner? Visit Partner Advantage and learn how to become one today!

Learn more about how Google Cloud is transforming retail and e-commerce to meet changing customer expectations at the NRF 2022 archives.