Google Cloud Results

• Replaced conflicting, time-consuming paper logs with a near real-time, transparent app
• Scaled rapidly and easily to accommodate new teams thanks to Google App Engine
• Enables photographic and video communication to replace confusing text
• New factory solution rolled out in just 15 days

In 1877, Pietro Barilla set up a small bakery to make pasta and baked goods for the people of Parma, Italy. Today, Barilla applies its 140 years of baking knowledge on a global scale, with six major manufacturing sites in Italy and an international network employing over 8,000 people. As the world’s leading producer of pasta, Barilla knows that when it comes to making quality food, great communication is key. That’s why the company plans to become a completely digital, looking to technology to improve the way it works.

Teams at the Barilla factory in Cremona work along a production line more than one-kilometer long, staffed by three shifts of workers a day. When one shift handed over to the next or requested machine maintenance teams, they used paper notebooks and unofficial instant messaging to communicate. That meant there was no authoritative, real-time record of events, communication was messy, oversight was poor, and teams had to hold daily morning meetings to synchronise notes.

Barilla worked with the Google Cloud Partner Injenia to create a solution, beginning with a consultative process on the factory floor.

“We had the idea to to start from the bottom and work up,” says Cristiano Boscato at Injenia. “Barilla’s top staff were brilliant about letting us do it. Eight of us from Injenia spent months on the factory lines with Barilla workers, collecting ideas on Google Docs, making presentations with Slides and collecting feedback with Forms. The CollaborAction app we created is the result of an amazing partnership.”

Co-designing a team social network

“Everything at the Cremona plant was managed offline, with paper,” explains Alessandra Ardrizzoia, Digital Engagement Senior Manager at Barilla. “Workers on the line would track events in notebooks, the shift leader would have another notebook, and the leader of the maintenance team would have yet another notebook. Everybody wrote their own text description of events, so there would be mismatches in the information going around.”

To resolve this, teams would meet at 8:30am every day to reconstruct a consistent narrative. In addition, machine maintenance workers were already using instant messaging to communicate with the line. Barilla and Injenia looked for a solution that could deliver a searchable, single version of events, with the ease of use of a mobile messaging application.

After consulting factory workers for ideas, Injenia created CollaborAction, a custom-built app that brought G Suite collaboration tools together on an Google App Engine platform, using Google Cloud SQL to index files. Google+, Google Drive and Hangouts were not only highly available and easy-to-use, they also “helped with fast adoption, with interfaces that workers could already relate to.” Meanwhile Google App Engine enabled the Injenia team to deliver updates and new versions at speed, as part of a feedback process with workers who offered suggestions through a link to Forms embedded in the app.

Google+ provides an intuitive social media dashboard that workers felt comfortable with. Now teams use company tablets placed at intervals along the line to log in, report issues to other teams, photograph problems, schedule maintenance, give status updates through Hangouts chat, and have visibility on the whole process as it takes place.

“Everyone in the Cremona plant was really happy with the new social collaboration process. Because they were involved in designing the solution, they felt involved and really engaged with the process,” says Alessandra. “And now that everyone is aligned with CollaborAction, all the work in the plant is more effective. They are more agile and can use their time in more added-value activities.”

Optimization and a national roll-out

Created in Cremona, now CollaborAction connects over 1,000 users in six of Barilla’s factories in Italy. “The pilot at Cremona took one month, and adoption has been easier and faster in every plant we’ve taken it to,” says Cristiano. “We have another five or six plants more, and it takes no more than 15 days to introduce. That’s incredible.”

Because CollaborAction is a mobile app built on Google App Engine, scaling to meet new demand has been simple. Now maintenance teams use the app on smartphones, line workers use it on tablets, and shift leaders use it on laptops, so the entire team is aligned in close to real-time on a single version of events. And now teams communicate with video and photographs as well as text, there’s less room for confusion, as Alessandra explains. “It’s no problem understanding what’s happening in a video or picture, compared to a message that just says ‘something is going wrong.’ On a production line, where one part leads into the next, that speed makes a difference, and means we don’t have to throw as much food away when something breaks down.”

“Now we’re collecting feedback from all of the plants using CollaborAction and using it to create a standardised solution that we can apply across all of our plants,” says Alessandra. “We’re side-by-side with the workers in that sense, trying to address their needs with new features. It’s a way to make the workers feel like part of the solution, and that the app represents their needs and their voice.”

Solving a universal problem

By the end of 2018, Barilla and Injenia aim to have deployed CollaborAction to 2,700 employees at 18 factories worldwide. Barilla has already collected more than 50,000 posts with the app, including around 20,000 photographs and videos, and is now considering ways to apply Cloud Machine Learning Engine to create a maintenance chatbot or direct IoT connection with machinery.

“CollaborAction hasn’t just made our maintenance processes faster and more efficient, its also exponentially increased the knowledge and understanding employees have about their work,” says Alessandra. “It’s improving team spirit, too, such as when employees use CollaborAction to arrange to play soccer. It’s become the main communication tool for the entire plant.”

Editor’s note: When Europe’s largest mobile communications company, Vodafone, was asked by the European Commission to help understand population movement across the European Union and the UK to help fight COVID-19, it was able to provide anonymized mobile network-based insights to answer the call. Here’s how Vodafone, with the support of Google Cloud, rapidly mobilized the COVID-19 frontline, while respecting its customers’ privacy.

With the emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020, the European Commission—the executive branch of the European Union (EU)—knew that technology would be instrumental in its fight to control the pandemic. With various lockdowns imposed across its member states, the Commission was keen to predict and prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to manage the related social, political and financial impacts. 

Mobile network data helps track COVID-19 across the EU

Mobile networks produce location data, which can be turned into useful anonymous insights to understand population movement within a geographic area. The European Commission, working with mobile industry association GSMA (Groupe Speciale Mobile Association), asked Europe’s major mobile phone operators for help in producing insights to support the fight against COVID-19. As the largest mobile network operator within the EU, Vodafone saw this as a critical opportunity to participate. 

Vodafone had previous experience of using mobile network data to support pandemic research. For example, in 2019, Vodafone provided mobility pattern analysis to help track the spread of Malaria in Mozambique. And, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (prior to working with the European Commission), Vodafone assisted the Italian and Spanish governments in understanding their citizens’ mobility patterns. Vodafone had also previously offered anonymized and aggregated population mobility insights to support public transport and tourism authorities and retail organizations in a number of countries. Consequently, Vodafone was perfectly placed to play a greater role in supporting the European Commission’s response to the pandemic. 

When asked to assist the European Commission, Vodafone first considered how it could safely share its data with the governing body without providing details on the individual movements of its customers. It realized it could achieve this through an elaborate set of anonymization and aggregation techniques. Insights are aggregated from a minimum of 50 users and Vodafone only shared these anonymous insights and never the actual raw data with the Commission. As specified by the EU, these insights are then presented onto a large geographical region, typically a city or a county with thousands of people living in that area.

These insights illustrate how people move, helping to determine how lockdowns and self-isolation measures were impacting behaviors.

Using Google Cloud to collate and store population mobility data

In April 2020, Vodafone began migrating its operations, including its mobile data, to Google Cloud on servers in Europe and the UK with elaborate security safeguards, including encryption, building on a previous partnership. 

With the data residing in EU and UK data centers and not the United States, Vodafone could then retrieve anonymous insights from Google Cloud Storage instantaneously. Before supplying any information to the European Commission, however, Vodafone used Dataflow to validate the data and run a series of tests to ensure the database had accurate data, before ingesting and archiving the relevant metrics. For instant access, the data was then made available to the European Commission using a Redis database on Google Kubernetes Engine.

To ensure aggregate Vodafone customer data was always safe, secure, and anonymous, all entry points to the front-end were protected behind Google Cloud Armor, where only specific IP addresses were allowed. Using these tools, seamless data pipelines fed in predefined key performance indicators from each specified European market. While data quality measures ensured the definitions for metrics across markets were consistent and could be accurately compared.

The architecture (pictured below) shows how Vodafone integrated and anonymized its data on Google Cloud.

Live interactive dashboard shows population mobility in real-time

With its data integrated on Google Cloud, Vodafone created a live, interactive dashboard to track mobility patterns and share relevant information with the European Commission in real-time. 

The European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC) was able to gather valuable information from these insights, which enabled them to see where population mobility was aiding the spread of the disease, when cross-referenced with health data. It could also assess the implications of lockdowns on different populations and forecast cross-country spreading.

Mobile data aids disease modeling for multiple stakeholders

The Vodafone data became instrumental in modeling the likely course of the disease too. For example, the University of Southampton in the UK used it to predict the outcome of different coordinated COVID-19 exit strategies across Europe. This research was published in Science Magazine in September 2020. 

The Vodafone data dashboard continues to be used by individual governments, NGOs and organizations to further investigate the impacts of the pandemic and to measure the effectiveness of response strategies alongside the rollout of vaccination programs. The project also helped Vodafone win a DataIQ award for most effective stakeholder engagement. 

Using the learnings from this project, Vodafone has been able to adapt its own B2B solution, called Vodafone Analytics, by adaptIng and migrating the code to work in Google Cloud Platform. This solution has been rolled out across Germany, Greece, Portugal and South Africa, and new countries are being onboarded every day. Vodafone Analytics already has more than 100 customers leveraging it for a variety of use cases—Italian fashion retailer OVS, uses it for its smart retail operation, while global real estate company, JLL, uses it to understand the footfall passing through its properties. 

Working together, Vodafone and Google Cloud continue to help a range of organizations, governments, and NGOs navigate through the ongoing pandemic,  optimize their operations, and help the greater good, without infringing individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy.

To learn more about Google Cloud and Vodafone, watch our full interview here.

In recent years, the grocery industry has had to shift to facilitate a wider variety of checkout journeys for customers. This has meant ensuring a richer transaction mix, including mobile shopping, online shopping, in-store checkout, cashierless checkout or any combination thereof like buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS).  

What’s more, in the past year and a half alone grocers have had to enable consumers new ways to shop for essentials. This has included needing to rapidly integrate or build on-demand delivery apps, offer curbside pickup with near-instant fulfillment as well as support touchless and cashless checkout experiences. Searches on Google Maps for retailers in the US with curbside pickup options have increased by 9000% since March 2020, and we believe these trends from 2020 will continue to define the future of grocery shopping.

The future of grocery will require agility and openness

Firstly, the need to rapidly adapt to changing consumer habits will be the new normal. Grocers will increasingly look to digitally transform legacy retail systems and modernize point of sale (POS) platforms to deliver and scale omnichannel experiences as quickly as possible. This necessitates a more agile and open architectural approach to technology – one built on microservices and leverages APIs so that new applications and experiences can be built, integrated and delivered faster.

Automation and data-driven retailing will be table stakes

In order for retailers to blend what they’re offering in the store with digital experiences more efficiently, they will also need to automate more. For example, with automation and business intelligence, grocers can take labor that might have been tied up with tender operations and checkout and redistribute those resources to restocking shelves, curbside pick-up or improving customer experiences. 

Automation and access to real-time in-store inventory & supply chain data can also help grocers avoid the supply chain challenges seen in the early days of COVID-19. Grocers will need to find ways to leverage automation to ingest, organize, and analyze data from physical store networks, digital channels, distribution centers to better forecast demand and manage future fluctuations.

How NCR and Google Cloud are helping grocers adapt to disruption with operational agility

Helping grocers improve operational agility to address changing consumer shopping habits and to thrive during times of disruption is something that NCR and Google Cloud have teamed up to do. NCR has over 135 years of experience in retail, having invented the cash register and are continuing to help grocers innovate. NCR Emerald builds upon the company’s leadership in POS software and has turned it into a unified platform that helps grocers operate the entire store from front to back. The solution supports cashier-led checkout, self-checkout, integrated payments, merchandising, and enables regional managers and corporate employees access to the analytics and tools needed to optimize loyalty programs and promotions.

NCR has invested in a comprehensive, agile, and API-led retail architecture that lets grocers continually innovate and design new experiences as customers and the industry evolve. By running Emerald on Google Cloud, NCR can offer the solution on a subscription basis, helping grocers lower upfront capital expenditures and ensuring scalability. What’s more, NCR can tap into Google Cloud’s strength in data, analytics, and openness to deliver three key imperatives. Let’s take a look at each of these below.

Run the way grocers need to while leveraging Google Cloud as a single source of logic

Traditionally the POS system lived in the store. If disaster strikes, people still need access to food and essentials so the grocery store still needs to operate. It hardly gets more mission-critical than that. NCR Emerald is built on microservices, leveraging Kubernetes for front-of-house compute, and VMs (See graphic 1 below). This makes it easy to support lightweight clients accessible by store employees via any range of mobile devices, computer terminals, self-service kiosks, peripheral devices like receipt printers as well as legacy applications.

What’s unique is that because Emerald runs on Google Cloud, it supports all those in-store and digital touchpoints mentioned above, but also allows grocers to run lean. Emerald leverages Google Cloud as a single source of truth and operates a lot of what it does out of logic. Every sales transaction coming from every channel, including e-commerce, can be logged via NCR’s Hosted Service and centralized in BigQuery and Bigtable as a transaction data master. This enables the grocer to manage any transactional use case very consistently, whether it e supporting customers who want to purchase in one store and return in another, offering digital receipts or the ability to exchange online purchases in store. Emerald on Google Cloud can help retailers extend capabilities through the power of the cloud but not need to live exclusively in the cloud. In other words, the solution allows grocers the ability to run the way they need to.

Enable data-driven and real-time decision making for grocers

Store managers, regional managers, category managers, and others all require different cuts of the data to do their jobs effectively. However, data silos persist and how data is formatted and arranged can still remain pretty static. Therefore allowing users with different roles the ability to view and analyze that data quickly and in different ways continues to be a challenge. 

As mentioned above, Emerald leverages Google Cloud data management solutions as the central repository for transactional, behavioral, and merchandising data. Every transaction from every store and every channel can be stored via NCR Hosted Service on BigQuery and Bigtable. NCR Analytics then harnesses the advanced analytical and data visualization capabilities of Looker to help grocers get a consolidated view of their business across all channels and then allow employees to slice and dice the data they way they need to. NCR Analytics also leverages the power of Google Cloud AI and machine learning to add another level of intelligence to the retailer’s data. For example, store managers can visualize how well they’re using their real estate and see how productive lanes 1-3 are compared with 7-10 or compare self-service versus manned lanes. By mapping to the retailer’s own catalog, they can also break down category-level performance and trends.

NCR Analytics takes advantage of Google Cloud’s data pipeline to reduce processing time, with scaling and resource management provided out of the box. By letting the cloud store and process the data, NCR is providing the ability for retailers to analyze their data in near real-time across all platforms – a real game changer in the grocery business.

Open APIs let grocers continually enrich the retail experience

Finally, Emerald is built on an API-first architecture managed through Apigee. It uses the power of Apigee as an open API platform to expose how Emerald can work with other NCR applications like loyalty and promotions, and third party applications like mobile ordering and order delivery to enrich the grocery experience for employees and customers. Every API that Emerald uses is available on Apigee, allowing them to share code samples and giving developers the ability to run scripts. This approach can allow retailers the ability to innovate in a fraction of the time and cost, speeding up 3rd party integrations up front and as businesses grow. 

Take, for example, Northgate Market, a chain of 40 stores in California, that were able to transform its digital operations and enable experiences that set it apart from competitors – quickly and simply with Emerald. It took less than 6 months to go from contract to live deployment in the first store. Since then, Northgate Market has been able to extend their intelligence by leveraging the power of Looker and NCR Analytics.

Learn more about how NCR has been able to leverage an open, cloud-enabled architecture to help customers innovate across the retail, hospitality, and banking industries on the webinar “Role of APIs in Digital Transformation”. You can also learn more about how Northgate uses e-commerce to transform customer experience and gain consumer insights.