Arvind Ltd has been in the apparel industry for more than 90 years, with its retail powerhouse Arvind Fashions Ltd being the backbone of well-known names in the retail fashion industry in India.

Arvind Fashions Ltd (Arvind) has seen significant growth in its portfolio with new franchises being added every year. The six high conviction brands include Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Sephora, Arrow, U.S. Polo Assn. & Flying Machine.

To secure a foundation for future growth, the company has embarked on a digital transformation (DX) journey, focusing on profitability and improving the customer experience. The key objectives for Arvind’s DX is to unlock the value of existing applications, gain new insights, and build a solid workflow with resilient systems.

Getting Google Cloud to address the challenges around insights & analytics was a natural step forward, since Arvind had already formed a relationship with Google Cloud, starting with its productivity and collaboration tools during the pandemic.

Key Challenges

Arvind’s enterprise applications estate is a mix of SAP, Oracle POS, logistics management systems and other applications. Having so many different applications made it a challenge for the company to bring all of this data together to drive retail insights and at the same time maintain the freshness of its products.

As a case in point, the existing sales reporting and inventory reconciliation process had been enabled by a mix of automated and semi-automated desktop applications. There were challenges to scale the infrastructure in order to process large amounts of data at a low latency.

The synchronization of master data across functions was critical to build the data platform that provides consistent insights to multiple stakeholders across the organization.

Solution Approach – Modern Data Platform

There are several ways to solve the challenges above and do more by building a modern data analytics platform. For example, using a data lake based approach that builds use case by use case, hybrid data estates and so on. Regardless of the approach, it is important to define the solution based on certain principles.

In Arvind’s scenario, the key business principles considered are that data platforms should support Variety, Variability, Velocity and Volume. Each of these 4 V’s are critical business pivots to successful fashion retailing. Variety in SKU’s to deal with myriad fashion trends every season, Variability in shopping footfalls due to different festivities, weekends and special occasions, Velocity to be agile and responsive to customer needs, and Volumes of data that bring richer insights.

This is where Google BigQuery enabled data platform comes in, as it is able to meet the needs above.

BigQuery is the mothership of the data and analytics platform on Google Cloud. Its serverless construct ensures that data engineering teams focus only on insights & analytics. Storage and compute is decoupled and can be independently scaled. BigQuery has been leveraged to service both the raw as well as the curated data zones.

With BigQuery procedures, it is possible to process the data natively within the data warehouse itself. Procedures have been leveraged to process the data in a low latency manner with the familiar SQL.

But then what happens to advanced analytics and insights? With simplicity being our key guiding principle, BigQuery machine learning ensures that data analysts can create, train and deploy analytics models even with complex requirements. It can also consume data from Looker Studio, which is seamlessly integrated with BigQuery.

Here are the key principles and highlights of the data platform that have been achieved:

• Simple, yet exhaustive – We needed a solution with vast technical capabilities such as data lake & data warehouse, data processing, data consumption, analytics amongst others. And at the same time it needed to be simple to implement and run ongoing operations.
• Agility – High quality analytics use cases typically require a significant amount of time, effort and skill set. While building a simple solution we ensured that the selection of technology services ensured agility in the long term.
• Security – An organization can be truly successful if the insights and analytics operations are democratized. But while data is made available to a wider community, we need to ensure data governance and security.
• Ease of operations – Data engineering teams spend a lot of time doing infrastructure setting and management operations. With BigQuery, teams can put in more effort on building the data pipelines and models to feed into analytics instead of worrying about the infrastructure operations.
• Costs – Decoupling storage and compute allows for flexible pricing. A pay-as-you-go model is the ideal solution to managing costs.

Business Impact

The ingestion frequency of the store level inventory (~800 stores) has now been changed to daily. With the additional data volumes and processing the scaling on BigQuery has been seamless. There are new processes and dashboards to address the reconciliation and root cause analysis. Operational efficiencies have improved leading to better productivity and turn around time of critical processes.

The discrepancies in various reconciliation activities have drastically reduced by an order of magnitude of 300X due to the capabilities offered by the data platform. Not only is it possible to identify discrepancies but the data platform has also enabled in identifying the root causes for the same as well.

Arvind Fashions Ltd have also been able to enhance some of the existing business processes and systems with insight from the data platform.

It’s going to be an exciting journey for Arvind Fashions Ltd and Google Cloud. There are several initiatives ready for kick off such as getting more apps on the edge devices, warehouse analytics, advanced customer data platforms, predicting the lifecycle of designs, style codes and other exciting initiatives.

Today, we’re announcing that we’re working with AT&T to establish Messages by Google as the default messaging application for all AT&T customers in the United States using Android phones. The collaboration aims to help accelerate the industry toward global Rich Communication Services (RCS) coverage and interoperability to offer a consistent, secure, and enhanced messaging experience for all Android users around the world.

“Many AT&T customers have enjoyed the advantages of RCS for years when texting with friends and family,” said David Christopher, executive vice president and general manager – AT&T Mobility. “We look forward to working closely with Google to extend these benefits to even more of our customers as they enjoy richer conversations with others around the world.”

Working together, AT&T and Google will continue the momentum to upgrade SMS with enhanced messaging features offered in Messages, which includes the support of chat features based on the open RCS standard. With Messages as the default messaging application, all AT&T customers using Android devices will get enhanced features so they can:

• Share full-resolution pictures from a recent event or vacation 
• Send a higher-quality video of that soccer goal and the celebration that followed
• Know when someone is replying to a text
• Send and receive messages over Wi-Fi or data
• Participate in group chats where it’s easy to add someone else to the conversation, or let someone leave, without starting a brand new thread

In addition to these features, we’re also rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one RCS conversations between people using Messages and people who have chat features enabled.

For years, we’ve been working with the mobile industry and device makers to bring enhanced and secure messaging to everyone on Android. Today’s announcement—that AT&T customers using Android devices will soon be able to enjoy these features by default—is a major step forward.

The Google Maps Platform Android SDK supports extensions for reactive programming, which helps you write code to handle asynchronous operations.

Write reactive and responsive mapping applications with Google Maps Platform

In mobile apps, asynchronous events can happen at any point in time: user touch events, waiting for network calls to complete, or receiving push notifications, to name a few. As an app developer, accounting for these events and composing them with other asynchronous events can be challenging. Reactive programming is an alternative to passing callbacks for different events and helps simplify the process of working with asynchronous events. In reactive programming, events are modeled as a stream, emitting items over time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TmJvOZfBVQ%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

There are two libraries you can use to write reactive code: Kotlin Flows and RxJava. The next two videos show you how to use each one.

Writing reactive and responsive mapping applications using Kotlin

If you’re a Kotlin developer looking to use Coroutines and Flows, the KTX library allows you to use Kotlin Flows to receive events. The Maps KTX library includes extension functions that return Kotlin Flow objects, so you can listen to events in a reactive manner. Unlike suspending functions, which return a single value, Kotlin Flows can return several values over time. For example, you can use a Flow to receive camera event changes over time. To get started using Kotlin Flows in your app, include the Maps KTX library in the dependencies section in your build.gradle file.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cotx1ZmEYg8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Creating reactive maps on Android with RxJava

Integrate Google Maps Platform SDKs with popular Android library RxJava. RxJava is the Java implementation of Reactive Extensions, which is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences. One thing RxJava does is allows you to convert callback-based asynchronous code into a chain of transformations. Learn how this works and the other ways you can use RxJava in the third video in this series.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AgGE7fAMrdA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

​​We hope you learn more about reactive programming concepts to help you build responsive and reactive mobile apps in this three-part YouTube series. Have ideas for helpful videos you’d like to see on our channel? Leave a comment on any of our videos. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest updates, tutorials, customer stories, and more.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Do hamburgers really come from Hamburg? This may still be a matter of debate, but the popularity of American-style burger joints not just in Hamburg but all over Germany, is clear. Germany’s top two fast food companies are both burger chains. One of them is BURGER KING®, a global brand that welcomes more than 11 million customers worldwide every day. The company arrived in Germany in 1976, when its first restaurant opened in Berlin. It now operates more than 100 restaurants across Germany, with franchisees operating more than 600 restaurants of their own.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important. That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

Previously a subsidiary of the U.S. business, BURGER KING® Germany became an independent company in 2015. As a result, it needed to develop its own IT infrastructure, and the changeover needed to happen fast. “We had to put in place systems that would work for the entire network of franchisees and enable us to easily roll out campaigns,” explains Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager at BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier partner Cloudwürdig, BURGER KING® Germany chose Google Cloud and G Suite as the right combination to suit its needs.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important,” says Oliver. “That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

Building a franchisee platform in just three months

When a business has multiple franchisees, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, especially in the fast-paced fast food environment. “We have to collate data from all our franchisees and produce reports quickly in order to react to changes in customer behavior,” explains Oliver. “That means processing every transaction that takes place in our restaurants.” Following the restructure, BURGER KING® Germany also needed to build a secure invoicing system with data storage and optimize its communication channels.

“Using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

With support from Witter-IT, BURGER KING® Germany chose Cloudwürdig to build its BKD Connect internal platform on Google Cloud. Thanks to the ready-to-go tools on Google Cloud, it was able to put its invoicing system and data warehouse in place in just three months.

For the BURGER KING® Germany data warehouse, Cloudwürdig built an ETL pipeline that channels ticket data for every sale into BigQuery. “Data is gathered from the restaurants,” says Oliver, “and using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

As the ticket data for every transaction is stored in BigQuery, the marketing team can easily see exactly which products are selling well. That’s crucial for tweaking promotions as well as monitoring the supply chain to make sure enough produce is delivered to restaurants in response to changes in demand.

“Thanks to BigQuery, we have a speedy data pipeline that enables us to react on the same day to changes in the market and eliminate bottlenecks in production,” says Oliver.

Switching to G Suite to improve communication

To enable franchisees to sign in to its BKD Connect Platform, BURGER KING® Germany needed a secure authentication system. To solve that problem, it chose to provide franchisees with G Suite accounts. “It’s really easy to set up a new franchisee on the platform. I just create a new G Suite account and Drive folder for it, and it’s ready to go,” says Oliver. G Suite also helps the franchise network to run efficiently, as daily reports are automatically saved to Drive and shared to the appropriate regional network. “Thanks to that system, it’s much easier for any team at headquarters to access the information it needs,” Oliver explains.

BURGER KING® Germany also recently extended its use of G Suite across the whole company. “Following an evaluation of our previous email and productivity software, I made the decision to switch solely to G Suite,” says Oliver. BURGER KING® Germany employees now use Gmail, Calendar, and Drive for their day-to-day productivity needs. “We only just completed the migration, but already, everyone’s happy,” says Oliver. “It’s so easy to share a file using Drive or set up a meeting on Calendar.”

“We’re big fans of Hangouts Meet, and we have two rooms here at our Hanover headquarters equipped with Hangouts Meet hardware,” Oliver adds. “The speech quality is good, and it’s helpful to be able to see every participant, especially when you’re running a meeting with multiple franchisees.”

Optimizing infrastructure to power innovative campaigns

The BURGER KING® app, available for iOS and Android, helps the company to deliver a great customer experience. Through their MyBK accounts, guests can access coupons and special promotions. “We had a really interesting campaign for Easter: guests used the app to hunt for virtual Easter eggs,” explains Oliver. “We knew it was going to be big, and our previous back end wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic.”

To enable the marketing campaign to go ahead, BURGER KING® Germany moved the back end of the app, along with its website, to Google Cloud. For developing and running its web and app back ends, it now uses App Engine and virtual machines on Compute Engine, as well as Memorystore and Cloud Functions. For monitoring and logging, it uses Stackdriver, and Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS to easily handle its traffic.

“We ran the campaign without any performance issues, even though we were receiving several million hits a day,” says Oliver. Since migrating the back end to Google Cloud, the marketing team also launched the popular “Escape the Clown” campaign. “That campaign blew our minds!” says Oliver. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Google Cloud, because it required a lot of back end capacity.”

To develop the app infrastructure it needs, BURGER KING® Germany relies on Cloudwürdig. “Working with Cloudwürdig is great because the team has the same agile mindset as us,” says Oliver. “When we have a new idea, we just set up a meeting, and in a couple of days the new infrastructure is in place. For Escape the Clown, it only took a few weeks to get everything ready to launch.”

Leveraging integrated tools to grow the business

Using Google Cloud together with G Suite enables BURGER KING® Germany to run its franchise network efficiently, while keeping its IT team lean. “Google Cloud and G Suite are the perfect fit for the way of working at BURGER KING® Germany,” says Oliver. “Many of the company’s operatives are often on the road, visiting restaurants and franchisees. With these tools, they can work flexibly and react quickly to the situation on the ground.”

“In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants. With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

It also helps to keep infrastructure costs under control. “With Google Cloud, we only pay for what we use, which is really important for us,” Oliver explains. “It means we can scale up quickly if we see an opportunity to react to a trend in customer behavior and launch a new marketing campaign that resonates with the moment. When it’s finished, we can then scale down again, and that definitely saves us money.”

BURGER KING® is now working with Cloudwürdig to add more functionality to the BURGER KING® app using Google Kubernetes Engine. “We like to work with customers long-term to support their digital transformation. BURGER KING® Germany is a great example of how one project can develop into a great collaboration,” says Benny Woletz, Managing Director of Cloudwürdig.

BURGER KING® also plans to expand its presence in Germany and gain a greater market share by further tailoring both its marketing and the way it runs its restaurants to answer its guests’ needs. “In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants,” says Oliver. “With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”