With its on-premise data stack, Morrisons only had daily access to its business data. Migrating to BigQuery and Looker gave Morrisons the real-time data it needed to optimize operations and deliver the best service to customers.
With its on-premise data stack, Morrisons only had daily access to its business data. Migrating to BigQuery and Looker gave Morrisons the real-time data it needed to optimize operations and deliver the best service to customers.
Morrisons has come a long way since founder William Morrison began selling butter and eggs at his Bradford market stall in 1899. Now one of the UK’s largest supermarkets, Morrisons serves nine million customers a week across its 500 supermarkets and 1,600 Morrisons Daily stores, with more than 97% of UK postcodes covered by its online delivery service. Some things, though, haven’t changed. Morrisons’ rich British heritage is proudly on display at the fresh-produce counters throughout its stores, where the supermarket’s unique status as a food producer, with its own farms and abattoirs, enables it to stock the freshest, highest-quality produce.
Alongside this rich heritage, Morrisons boasts an equally strong culture of innovation. Across the UK, Morrisons’ customers expect to find the freshest products on the shelves, whenever they want them. Delivering on these expectations requires a vast and highly complex logistics operation to ensure supply lines run without friction, warehouses are stocked, and deliveries arrive precisely on time. That operation in turn needs data to enable accurate reporting and sophisticated machine-learning (ML) models to forecast demand. The richer and more up to date the data, the more accurate the predictions, and the better Morrisons can give customers the products they demand.
Previously, the data Morrisons used for reporting and ML forecasting was stored in an on-premise database. For security reasons, Morrisons couldn’t connect this database to its cloud systems, so it needed to export its data before it could be used. As a result, the company typically produced its reports on a daily basis, meaning its models were not built on real-time information.
“If you can't access the data in real time, it becomes very difficult to build algorithms that can operate in real time, so you're always working a day behind the real world,” explains Peter Laflin, Chief Data Officer at Morrisons. “By migrating our data to Google Cloud, we’ve gone from being able to report daily to having real-time reports to ensure our operation is running as effectively as possible for our customers.”
By migrating our data to Google Cloud, we’ve gone from being able to report daily to having real-time reports to ensure our operation is running as effectively as possible for our customers.
Peter Laflin
Chief Data Officer, Morrisons
Meeting customers’ expectations with real-time data insights
Morrisons chose to migrate its data to BigQuery because of its first-party integration with Vertex AI, which Morrisons’ ML engineers use to build their models. With the limitless scalability of BigQuery, the team no longer needed to worry about reaching the limit of its processing power, as it did with its on-premise database. At the same time, Morrisons also wanted to integrate its reporting layer with its data layer to save time building new pipelines to third-party systems. Impressed with its ease-of-use, Morrisons chose to switch to Looker from its previous third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
“We talked to a number of providers, but ease of data engineering and integration were our key priorities, which is what we got by integrating Looker with BigQuery,” Laflin explains. “With Looker’s semantic layer, our data scientists have much less work to do in the modeling steps, making their jobs much easier, which means we can ship new dashboards very quickly.”
The Morrisons team worked closely with Google Cloud partner TCS to optimize data flows from BigQuery to Looker to enable accurate real-time reporting and predictions. These reports and insights are now having a significant impact in departments across the business. For example, every sale made by any Morrisons store now feeds directly into BigQuery, with data pipelines automatically updating relevant dashboards in Looker, with no more than a fifteen-minute delay. This is a 98.96% improvement on its previous setup, when reports were produced daily. Now, a store manager can look at a Looker dashboard and understand exactly what products are available in store at that moment, and what they need to order to keep stock levels constant. What’s more, with NotebookLM, built with Gemini 2.0, employees can convert those reports into audio files to listen to on their mobile devices while they are on the move, increasing their efficiency as they work.
With Looker, anybody in the business can access the data they need without needing to understand where the data is, how it works, or how to query it. The business insights we can now give our employees are endless.
Peter Laflin
Chief Data Officer, Morrisons
“With Looker, anybody in the business can access the data they need without needing to understand where the data is, how it works, or how to query it,” adds Laflin. “The business insights we can now give our employees are endless.”
Giving customers a guided tour with the in-app Product Finder
Having all its data in BigQuery has allowed Morrisons to create new solutions for customers that wouldn’t have been possible before. The supermarket’s new Product Finder in the Morrisons app is a prime example. During the busy Christmas and Easter periods each year, Laflin’s team descends onto the shop floors of Morrisons supermarkets to help serve customers. They spend much of their time helping customers to find products in the busy stores, a task often complicated by the fact that shelves have been temporarily rearranged for seasonal promotions.
The Google Cloud team has been fantastic throughout. They’re very knowledgeable and helpful, and they care as much about our customers as we do.
Peter Laflin
Chief Data Officer, Morrisons
Last year, with all its data now in BigQuery, Laflin and his team built a simple tool to use on their phones to help customers find the products they were looking for. This tool was so effective, they then decided to build a full version and make it available to customers all year round. Now, a customer can use the Product Finder on their phones as they walk around the supermarket. By typing in the name of a product, they can immediately find which aisle a product is on and in which part of that aisle. The Product Finder is proving very popular among shoppers, receiving 50,000 hits a day over the most recent Easter period. It is not just the customers that benefit — helping people find the products they’re looking for helps Morrisons in turn to sell more products.
The Product Finder uses Cloud Run functions to process the customer’s search term. Gemini 1.5 Pro helps to make sense of that search term and correlate it with one of the supermarket’s product codes. That product code is then sent to BigQuery, where the product data lives, including availability and location for each supermarket. Finally, that information is sent back to the customer in a matter of seconds, giving them real-time information about the product’s availability and location, and allowing them to quickly find a product, even if the shelves have been rearranged that day. For Laflin, it’s not just the Google Cloud technology that helps when developing such projects, but the relationship with the Google Cloud team, too.
A firm foundation for future innovation
With real-time data, Morrisons can now use Vertex AI to build accurate ML forecasting models to help departments across the business make strategic decisions. The fact that Vertex AI is a managed service allows Morrisons’ ML engineers to forget about maintaining the infrastructure and concentrate on their business objectives. “We can be far more expressive in exploring the data and modeling it for whatever purpose we need, whether that’s trying to predict how many items we might sell next week, whether a customer is likely to buy a product from us, or how we optimize our network to reduce the number of miles we drive every year. There's a whole range of business problems that we can now solve easily using Vertex AI,” Laflin explains.
At the same time, Morrisons is continuing to use Gemini and BigQuery to help customers in other ways, too. With all customer feedback automatically stored in BigQuery, Morrisons has a real-time view of customer sentiment and trends. With Gemini it summarizes those trends, giving departments across the business the ability to understand what customers’ particular issues are at that moment, enabling the supermarket to take immediate steps to resolve them.
Having given staff access to dashboards of data, Laflin’s team is now looking at how Morrisons can go even further, expanding its use of Gemini to give employees their own personal assistants to help explore business data using generative AI.
For Laflin, projects like this wouldn’t have been possible prior to modernizing the company’s data stack. “The difference between then and now is like night and day,” says Laflin. “When we started, our data scientists had to wait to access the data each day. Now, not only can the data scientist access it in real time, our business colleagues can too. That’s all been made possible by Google Cloud.”
The difference between then and now is like night and day. When we started, our data scientists had to wait to access the data each day. Now, not only can the data scientist access it in real time, our business colleagues can too. That’s all been made possible by Google Cloud.
Peter Laflin
Chief Data Officer, Morrisons
Morrisons is one of the UK’s largest supermarkets and serves nine million customers a week across its 500 supermarkets and 1,600 Morrisons Daily stores, with more than 97% of UK postcodes covered by its online delivery service.
Industry: Retail
Location: UK
Products: BigQuery, Looker, Cloud Run functions, Gemini, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud partner — TCS
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a digital transformation and technology partner of choice for industry-leading organizations worldwide. Since its inception in 1968, TCS has upheld the highest standards of innovation, engineering excellence, and customer service.
