King's Stella: Empowering better living for all with Google Cloud analytics
About King's Stella
King's Stella was founded by visionary entrepreneur Suthep Kittikasemsak more than 50 years ago, under the parent company Siampoolsup Inter-Chemical Co., Ltd. A Thai pioneer in aerosol, the company launched the nation's first air freshener in 1963 under the brand name King's Stella Air Freshener Spray. Becoming Thailand's leading player in home care freshness products, King's Stella has grown its product line to include air care, home care, personal care, car care, and pet care products, on a mission to bring comfort and freshness to every corner of Thailand.
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About GoPomelo
Bangkok-based GoPomelo is a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner. It launched in 2008 to provide digital transformation services with best-in-class cloud solutions across five subsidiaries in Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. It is the winner of Google Cloud’s 2020 Diversity & Inclusion Partner of the Year Award.
King's Stella executed a comprehensive data analytics overhaul, grew its customer base by 35% in a year, and empowered its leadership with real-time, data-driven decision-making on Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results:
- Frees up engineering team to drive innovation by reducing DevOps from 40 hours per week to three
- Enables top leadership to make real-time strategic decisions by bringing data query time down from 30 minutes to seconds
- Accelerates business growth by using BigQuery to crunch Google Maps data for a 35% boost in customer base
- Empowers retailers across Thailand by analyzing sales data to yield a 30% drop in product return rate
35% increase in customer growth in one year
Nearly six decades ago, entrepreneur Suthep Kittikasemsak launched Thailand's first air freshener during a period of rapid economic growth, dreaming of bringing a fresh breeze of modernization to an emerging society. The King's Stella brand quickly became an iconic fixture of everyday life, helping families across the nation overcome stubborn odors to improve their quality of life.
Today King's Stella is one of Thailand's dominant players in a vast range of household products including air fresheners, washing liquid, hand sanitizers, toilet fresheners, car shampoo, and pet grooming products. The founder's grandson, Chutiphon Kittikasemsak, is driving the original vision of household empowerment as the innovation leader of a family firm bringing new levels of comfort and freshness to Thai life.
"We have a legacy to live up to spreading our founder's vision of household empowerment, but we couldn't keep it going with legacy data solutions. Everything changed when we discovered the power of BigQuery and Looker Studio to bring the real-time data insight we needed to turbo-charge our expansion journey."
—Chutiphon Kittikasemsak, Deputy Managing Director, King's StellaTo advance the mission of "reaching every Thai household," King's Stella needs to look beyond product development to optimize distribution and logistics, cultivate new growth markets, and target the most promising sales prospects. All of this requires analysis of vast amounts of sales and demographic data. A legacy on-premises architecture kept all this data isolated in different physical servers, making data analytics a slow, manual process that couldn't keep pace with King's Stella's enterprise ambitions.
Three years ago, Chutiphon Kittikasemsak decided King's Stella needed a comprehensive cloud modernization, beginning with world-class data processing and analytics tools, to power the next stages of its Thai growth narrative. The firm turned to Google Cloud and a combination of BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and Looker Studio and unleashed a wave of data-driven insight that enabled it to expand its customer base by 35% in one year.
"We have a legacy to live up to spreading our founder's vision of household empowerment, but we couldn't keep it going with legacy data solutions," says Chutiphon Kittikasemsak, Deputy Managing Director of King's Stella. "Everything changed when we discovered the power of BigQuery and Looker Studio to bring the real-time data insight we needed to turbocharge our expansion journey."
"By slashing the time it takes to query data, BigQuery enables our leadership to make real-time strategic decisions. It's a big change from the past when action plans were often held up by lagging data insight. Thanks to BigQuery, we're full-speed ahead in our mission to reach every Thai household."
—Chutiphon Kittikasemsak, Deputy Managing Director, King's StellaUnleashing instant strategic decision-making with BigQuery and Looker Studio
Working with partner GoPomelo, King's Stella executed a comprehensive data modernization, migrating its entire trove of corporate data from physical servers into Cloud SQL as its nimble, scalable relational database. This gave King's Stella an optimal launching pad to feed data queries into BigQuery for real-time insight into the firm's evolving business landscape, from inventory needs to scouting customer prospects.
Crucially, says Kittikasemsak, Looker Studio gave the development team a simple yet powerful tool to visualize the data insight on instant, intuitive dashboards that the firm's top management could rely upon to make nimble business decisions on a daily basis.
The operational impact of the transition to BigQuery and Looker Studio has been significant. The King's Stella development team now produces multiple data intelligence reports per day, compared to one per week. That is thanks to the ability of BigQuery to bring down data query time from more than 30 minutes on its legacy solution, to mere seconds on BigQuery.
"By slashing the time it takes to query data, BigQuery enables our leadership to make real-time strategic decisions," says Kittikasemsak. "It's a big change from the past when action plans were often held up by lagging data insight. Thanks to BigQuery, we're full-speed ahead in our mission to reach every Thai household."
BigQuery has had the same liberating effect for the engineering team. The unlimited scalability of BigQuery data crunching, combined with automated market intelligence dashboards on Looker Studio, has reduced the time of DevOps tasks from 40 hours per week to three hours per week. That enables engineers to devote their energies to creative tasks, such as contributing to King's Stella's key mission of innovating and launching 60 new products per year.
Growing the customer base with BigQuery and Google Maps synergies
With improved data intelligence, King's Stella has experienced a major improvement in its ability to identify sales prospects, win new customers, and advance its commitment to serving the deepest reaches of Thailand.
King's Stella proactively sends its sales team into communities across the nation to scout retailers who have the strongest potential to sell the company's goods. They will then key in updates on the customer’s they have visited as well as their product preferences on their application to keep track. By feeding data from sales representatives through BigQuery about which vendors they have visited, and how many times, King's Stella is able to obtain a granular, continuously updated readout on Looker Studio of the best prospects to target at any given moment.
This ability is powerfully enhanced by King's Stella's deployment of Google Maps to analyze demographic data, studying store location in relation to population density. For any given region, the King's Stella sales team gauges the number of houses clustered around each store pin in Maps, giving it a snapshot of which vendors have the largest community around them, with the fewest competing shops.
This data is then fed through BigQuery to create precision rankings of priority prospects for the sales team to target, which then can be visualized on Looker Studio. According to Kittikasemsak, the deployment of BigQuery to crunch Maps demographic data has led to a 35% rise in customer growth over the past year.
Empowering customers with Google Cloud data analytics to reduce deadstock
As King's Stella uses BigQuery and Looker Studio to expand across Thailand, it is deploying the same powerful tools to help customers optimize their own operations. King's Stella is able to offer value to its retailers by analyzing their sales, purchasing, and inventory history. It thereby provides a granular feed on how many King's Stella products customers should be buying, in what seasons, and at what intervals. Since analyzing customer data in this way, King's Stella has seen a 30% decrease in its return rate of goods.
"Beyond our own corporate goals, a key part of our mission is to empower stores across Thailand with the data intelligence they need to thrive," says Kittikasemsak. "Google Cloud tools such as BigQuery and Looker Studio are helping us in a broader goal to help small businesses that don't yet have access to this technology."
"Google Cloud does so much more than boost operational efficiencies. It truly empowers us in our goal to focus all of our energies on creating innovative household products to improve life in Thailand."
—Chutiphon Kittikasemsak, Deputy Managing Director, King's StellaLiberating employees to pursue product innovation with App Engine
Having successfully built data analytics around BigQuery, King's Stella is now embarking on the next stage of its cloud transformation, which is moving its computing infrastructure to App Engine to power backend operations. By deploying App Engine to automate daily operational tasks, Kittikasemsak expects to achieve the same liberating effect for the company's overall workforce as the DevOps team has gained with Google Cloud data tools.
King's Stella currently has roughly 35% of its employees committed almost entirely to mundane, administrative tasks. With App Engine, the firm expects to reduce that ratio to less than 10%, freeing up a quarter of employees for creative pursuits.
"Google Cloud does so much more than boost operational efficiencies," says Kittikasemsak. "It truly empowers us in our goal to focus all of our energies on creating innovative household products to improve life in Thailand."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About King's Stella
King's Stella was founded by visionary entrepreneur Suthep Kittikasemsak more than 50 years ago, under the parent company Siampoolsup Inter-Chemical Co., Ltd. A Thai pioneer in aerosol, the company launched the nation's first air freshener in 1963 under the brand name King's Stella Air Freshener Spray. Becoming Thailand's leading player in home care freshness products, King's Stella has grown its product line to include air care, home care, personal care, car care, and pet care products, on a mission to bring comfort and freshness to every corner of Thailand.
About GoPomelo
Bangkok-based GoPomelo is a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner. It launched in 2008 to provide digital transformation services with best-in-class cloud solutions across five subsidiaries in Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. It is the winner of Google Cloud’s 2020 Diversity & Inclusion Partner of the Year Award.