Travis Perkins Plc: Using a data driven approach to improve sustainability and customer focus
About Travis Perkins
Travis Perkins plc is a leading partner to the construction industry and the UK's leading distributor of building materials to trade customers. The Group operates market-leading businesses, including Travis Perkins Builders' Merchants, Toolstation and specialists Keyline, BSS, CCF, and many more. With annual revenues of £5bn, the Group employs nearly 20,000 colleagues.
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Contact usAs part of its modernisation strategy, Travis Perkins plc decided to rebuild existing BigQuery and deploy Looker to support its aim of creating a culture based on data-driven decision-making, to improve efficiencies and reduce carbon emissions.
Google Cloud results
- Time for business teams to receive actionable insights to improve fleet efficiency down from months to minutes
- Delivery reports led to 4% reduction in delivery vehicles straying beyond their designated area, reducing carbon emissions
- Over 600 colleagues onboarded to Looker in less than 12 months
- Looker delivers significant return on investment after the first year of use through a number of use cases
- Introduction of new data academy with 100 apprentices to date, to ensure the business becomes more data-driven
Google Cloud has reduced carbon footprint and provided ROI
Construction has a key role to play in decarbonising the built environment, and Travis Perkins plc is committed to lead on this agenda.
In an increasingly digital world, the construction industry has been noticeably slow to adapt. A recent poll of builders' merchants revealed that underinvestment in IT solutions was a key concern, while others reported that digital technologies to reduce inefficiencies were being underutilised.
To Stephen Harris, Director of Finance Operations at the Group, the most urgent need for modernisation stems from the responsibility we all have to achieve net zero.
"The Group is making good progress against its ambitious Science Based Targets initiative ('SBTi') accredited carbon reduction targets it announced in 2021. There are also a number of initiatives in the pipeline that will significantly reduce carbon emissions for the future."
"As a leader in the industry, we see it as our responsibility to help our customers and suppliers to reduce the carbon footprint in our supply chain so we can help build better communities," says Harris.
To support this strategy, the Group has developed a data-driven approach and implemented a new target operating model for enabling the central team to support data teams across Travis Perkins Plc brands. This has helped to modernise the business by improving its focus on customers, empowering colleagues to work more efficiently and optimising sustainability and decarbonisation in the process.
Unifying data with a single source of truth
The first step on that journey was to gather and organise the Group's existing data effectively to provide a consistent and reliable data source. At the time, Travis Perkins plc's data was fragmented, with each business unit gathering and using data independently, in its own way, rather than making the best use of it collaboratively.
"There was inconsistency even across terminology," says Harris. "A single version of the truth was missing. As a result, we probably spent 80% of our time getting to the right analysis and then 20% applying it to a business decision when it should have been the other way around."
"We went through a detailed technical review process, comparing all the visualization tools both architecturally and based on what we wanted to achieve around the democratization of data. Looker won."
—Rob Barbour, Group Data and Insights Director, Travis PerkinsWith Travis Perkins' existing tech stack, the data pipelines were not scalable, and the lack of a data catalogue and a semantic layer made it more challenging for the business to locate the data they required and having a single version of the truth.
Rob Barbour, Group Data and Insights Director at Travis Perkins plc, realised that if the company was going to use data to modernise successfully, it would need to change its architecture.
"We went through a detailed technical review process, comparing all the visualisation tools both architecturally and based on what we wanted to achieve around the democratisation of data," he says. "Looker won."
With Google's data platform, including BigQuery and Looker, Rob and his team were able to build the unified, consistent, meta-data-driven data warehouse that was needed to give employees actionable insights in real-time.
"Looker's semantic layer and the Google data catalogue allow us to have that single version of the truth that anyone in the business can access and use in a governed way," explains Barbour. "And because Looker is browser-based, I can just add someone's email and they can access it straight away. In terms of our BigQuery pipelines, we utilise metadata-driven programming. This has increased our pipeline speed to market by 800%, and developer upskilling takes just a few days. This has enabled us to act on data insights very quickly, rather than taking months."
Reducing emissions with a focus on operational efficiency
Crucially, Travis Perkins plc is now able to use BigQuery and Looker to analyse and report on the carbon emissions on different parts of its supply chain where the data is available. Not only does this fit in with the business's goal of becoming more sustainable but also enabling a focus on operational efficiencies.
Barbour uses carbon data to help ensure that Travis Perkins lowers its own emissions: "We set up what we call delivery efficiency reporting, where branch managers across a number of our brands were getting a personalised report showing them which deliveries could have been done more efficiently, and therefore should have been transferred to a different branch. This has led to a 4% improvement in efficiency within months," he says.
"We set up what we call delivery efficiency reporting, where branch managers across a number of our brands were getting a personalised report showing them which deliveries could have been done more efficiently, and therefore should have been transferred to a different branch. This has led to a 4% improvement in efficiency within months."
—Rob Barbour, Group Data and Insights Director, Travis PerkinsMeanwhile, reporting on fuel receipts and delivery miles has helped the Group to lower fuel costs, while reducing carbon emissions from deliveries.
"Travis Perkins plc believes greater transparency is key to driving climate action, and so data and reporting helps us to promote a better culture for decarbonisation within our own business and in the industry more widely," says Barbour. "We are working with suppliers and customers to reduce supply chain emissions. This is critical, given that the built environment contributes around 40 percent of the world's carbon emissions."
Travis Perkins plc has also been using Looker to measure the carbon impact of running queries in BigQuery itself, giving the business an end-to-end view of the business' entire carbon footprint, enabling it to go even further towards meeting its emissions targets.
Getting to know the customer with real-time notifications
Beyond emissions reporting, Travis Perkins plc also uses data to modernise other aspects of its business. Using Google Cloud, the Group's data science team has built an advanced neural network model to segment customer behavioural data and provide a clear picture of customer trends and risk areas.
"The model shows customers' behavioural change," he explains. "It then provides our sales team with real-time data insights via Looker, in the form of a daily notification, alerting them to the change. Sales managers are able to gather information efficiently and prioritise effectively which customers to reach out to and ask whether they need help. Our initial single-region trial delivered an ROI of 28% in just over six months, meaning the investment has already paid for itself. And we expect the ROI to continue to grow as we roll it out nationwide."
Modernising the industry, with insights for all
By transforming its own business practices, Travis Perkins is now able to pass on its learning to others, and helping to modernise the industry through wider data use. The first step was to migrate the existing supplier and customer portals from its legacy technology onto Looker within a three-month period. These suppliers are now able to use data insights to make better decisions, plan optimal product placement and marketing activities across our branches, and track their product sales daily.
Using BigQuery and Looker instead of the previous solution for the customer and supplier portals reduced the support efforts. This new approach has enabled Travis Perkins plc to continue to grow its supplier and customer base and spend through greater data monetisation, with the portals delivering a positive ROI and enabling the business to elevate and deepen relationships with its suppliers and customers.
Building a data culture, one insight at a time
Barbour and Harris have been able to gauge user feedback with the help of the Looker write-back capability to see how all the changes have been received by departments across the company.
"In terms of sentiment, it's been really positive, both in terms of ease of use and speed to market," says Barbour. "And the adoption has not been a problem at all. With some of our previous analytics tools, access was a problem with installations and laptop permissions. With Looker, colleagues get online in minutes, and the dashboards are intuitive. You have a quick call - yep, got it, thanks. Simple as that."
"Until recently, people didn't believe the data, but the data is much more trusted now. Culturally, we're winning that battle. We're a more data-led organization than we were two years ago. And with Google Cloud, we've got the foundations to build upon that even further."
—Stephen Harris, Director of Finance Operations, Travis PerkinsAs Travis Perkins plc continues to use data to modernise and introduces more colleagues and functions to its data reporting tools, Barbour is looking forward to welcoming another cohort of data apprentices very soon. Travis Perkins plc launched the industry's first data apprenticeship scheme in 2021. One year later, 100 colleagues have completed their first year. Furthermore, the good news is that amongst these, nearly 40% are women, who want to continue to build a career in data.
For Harris, this has all been made possible due to a changing culture in the business and the industry more widely. "We've gone through a process," he explains, "and we now have data owners in our business that we didn't have before. Until recently, people didn’t believe the data, but the data is much more trusted now. Culturally, we're winning that battle, and we're a much more data-led organisation than we were two years ago. And with Google Cloud, we've got the foundations to build upon that even further."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Travis Perkins
Travis Perkins plc is a leading partner to the construction industry and the UK's leading distributor of building materials to trade customers. The Group operates market-leading businesses, including Travis Perkins Builders' Merchants, Toolstation and specialists Keyline, BSS, CCF, and many more. With annual revenues of £5bn, the Group employs nearly 20,000 colleagues.