How Barilla Created a Social Media Style App to Improve Efficiency
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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.”
The Latest in Spring Cloud GCP: Upgrading the Sample Bank of Anthos App
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We’re excited to announce that Spring Cloud GCP version 4.0 is now generally available! In this post, we’ll be describing what the new major version has to offer, and demonstrating the process of using the migration guide on one of our reference architectures, Bank of Anthos.
What’s new?
With this release, Spring Cloud GCP officially supports Spring Boot 3.x. However, this migration involves a number of breaking changes as outlined in the migration guide. The full list of changes made is available on Github, but the one of the most significant differences is that Java 17 is now a minimum requirement.
Another notable feature of this release is the addition of starter artifacts – Spring Boot starters for Google Cloud – that provide dependencies and auto-configurations for 80+ Google Client libraries. Just as the name suggests, these starters can serve as helpful starting points when working with a new client library. For now, they’re in preview.
These starters are not included in the BOM by default and need to be added as a dependency to your project before they can be used. For example, if you wanted to get started with Cloud Text-to-Speech, you would include the following:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>google-cloud-texttospeech-spring-starter</artifactId>
<version>4.0.0-preview</version>
</dependency>The upgrade process
We prepared a migration guide to help answer any questions involved with moving from 3.x to 4.x. Let’s follow those instructions to migrate Bank of Anthos.
We’ll start by cloning and building the application before the upgrade, according to the quickstart and development guide:
PROJECT_ID=<YOUR-PROJECT-ID>
gcloud services enable container --project ${PROJECT_ID}
git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/bank-of-anthos.git
cd bank-of-anthos/
gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com monitoring.googleapis.com \
--project ${PROJECT_ID}
REGION=us-central1
gcloud container clusters create-auto bank-of-anthos \
--project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}
gcloud container clusters get-credentials bank-of-anthos \
--project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}
skaffold run --default-repo=gcr.io/${PROJECT_ID}/bank-of-anthosAt the end of this, you should see a “deployment stabilized” message:
Deployments stabilized in 9.657 secondsWith the environment set up for development, we’re ready to move on to the actual migration. The migration is already complete at time of writing, but here’s the full list of changes made:
- We began by checking the current Java, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud GCP versions.
- Our Java version is okay, but the other two are out of date, and will need to be updated.
We can also add the Spring Cloud GCP BOM to manage our versions going forward while we’re here.
- Our Java version is okay, but the other two are out of date, and will need to be updated.
- Then, in no particular order, we can make the following code changes:
- Remove the explicit type declarations from our ResponseEntity instantiations.
- Replace all javax.* imports with Jakarta.* counterparts, since Spring 3.0 makes use of Jakarta EE 9.0
With those changes in place, the app is upgraded and ready to re-deploy!
Live example
For a finished example of this migration, check out the Bank of Anthos repository on Github. It’s an excellent sample application that showcases a polyglot Java & Python app, served on Kubernetes and Google Cloud. All CI/CD and configurations are open source, so it may be instructive as you approach this migration.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to provide comments or feedback on Twitter, or in the issues section of the repository.
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Modern web APIs allow businesses to build compelling experiences that generate, consume, and combine digital assets. They’ve become the foundation upon which digital business is built.
But the path to success can be unclear, rough, and challenging. The game has changed, after all, and this requires tossing out many of the rules by which you run your business.
You’re not alone. Other businesses have struggled down the path toward increased competitiveness, agility, and opportunity—and we, at Google Cloud, are privileged to partner with hundreds of customers across myriad industries as they gear up to go digital.
We’ve seen the successful decisions and strategies that have enabled companies to adapt to new digital realities. But we’ve also seen businesses make decisions that slowed, stymied, or, in some cases, reversed progress toward becoming an agile digital business.
There’s no one path to travel. There are many ways to make your business digital, but there are also many pitfalls. This is the survival guide to help navigate a smarter digital journey.
There’s one bit of advice we can offer above all else: GET STARTED. If you don’t take steps to adapt to the new competitive landscape and to your customers’ expectations, the very survival of your business is at risk.
Download the E-book to know more about the best and worst practices of how a business leads, measures, invests in, and executes an API initiative.
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Web APIs use HTTP, by definition. In the early days of web APIs, people spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how to implement the features of previous-generation distributed technologies like CORBA and DCOM on top of HTTP. This led to technologies like SOAP and WSDL. Experience showed that these technologies were more complex, heavyweight, and brittle than was useful for most web APIs. The idea that replaced SOAP and WSDL was that you could use HTTP more directly with much less technology layered on top.
Most modern web APIs are much simpler than SOAP or WSDL APIs, but preserve some of the basic ideas of remote procedure call—which is not native to HTTP—implemented much more lightly on top of HTTP. These APIs have come to be known as RESTful APIs. Apigee allows developers to only use HTTP without additional concepts.
Here’s Why: When you design any interface, you should try to put yourself in the shoes of the user. As an API provider, you may work on a single API or a small group of APIs, but it is likely that your users deal with many more APIs than yours. This means that they probably come to your API with significant knowledge of basic HTTP technologies and standards, as well as other APIs. Because of this, there is a lot of value in adhering to standards and established conventions, rather than inventing your own.
Download the E-book to get deeper insights into how you can make your developers’ life easier.
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A Headless Ecommerce on Google Cloud
Headless commerce helps marketing teams gain flexibility to alter frontend elements to run marketing campaigns and promotions and create the most superior customer experience on frontend devices. Watch the video to learn the basics of building a headless commerce application on Google Cloud. Meaning you will learn to have the frontend experience deployed on Cloud Run in Google Cloud, and integrate with commerce backend from Google Cloud Marketplace offering partner commerce tools.
Application Rationalization: Your App Development Team is Gonna Love It!
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On April 6th, 2022, Google Cloud established a new partnership with CAST, to help accelerate the migration and application modernization programs of customers worldwide, complementing the Google capabilities already available through the Google Cloud Application Modernization Program (CAMP).
Application Rationalization (App Rat) is the first step towards a cloud adoption or migration journey, through which you go over the application inventory to determine which applications should be Retired, Retained, Refactored, Replatformed, or Reimagined.
Why is this important to you?
Have the majority of your in-house applications still not moved to the cloud? How much time does your development team spend on support (bug fix, tickets, etc.) versus feature(s) development? Have Infrastructure/Platform dependencies ever delayed product rollout? Would an auto-scalable, managed cloud, increase stakeholder buy-in?
Can Google simplify this journey?
Google Cloud Application Modernization Program (CAMP) has been designed as an end-to-end framework to help guide organizations through their modernization journey by assessing where they are today, and provide a path forward. When it comes to App Rationalization, this depends on what your role is.
Step 1 (Assess): Who is the target audience? The Platform team (or) the Application team?
This determines what kind of challenges we are trying to solve. For e.g. the centralized platform team wants to set some guardrails on how the App teams deploy their apps. Streamlining this would allow the platform team to mature themselves into the SRE territory. The application team, on the other hand, loves flexibility, and the ability to perform Continuous Delivery.
These examples are only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the enterprise customers have a majority of their applications in the legacy world. Unless we move those business critical applications to the cloud, it’s impossible to mature as an enterprise. For more information, check State of DevOps 2021 report.
Step 2 (Analyze): Google Cloud offers the tooling and the framework to analyze your legacy applications.
Platform Owner (persona), usually have very little information on which workloads are a good fit for modernization.
Google’s StratoZone® SaaS platform provides customers with a data-driven cloud decision framework. The StratoProbe® Data Collector Application delivers the ability to easily deploy and scale the discovery of a customer’s IT environment for Private, Public, or Hybrid-cloud planning. To ease and accelerate the VM migration journey, Google Cloud offers assistance and guidance in making the right decisions when deciding to go to cloud.
Google’s mFit aims at unblocking customers in their transformation by providing workload selection for successful on-boarding, at scale, to Anthos, GKE and Cloud Run , in both pre-sales (e.g. proof-of-concept/proof-of-value) and post-sales (e.g. pilot and at scale execution) scenarios.
App and/or Business Owners (persona), get involved in a 1-week workshop, using CAST Highlight, which would provide rapid portfolio assessment through automated source code analysis for Cloud Readiness, Open Source risks, Resiliency, and Agility.
Step 3 (Plan & execute): Each organization is different. Some may follow the “Migration Factory” approach, and some may follow “Modernization Factory”, and some may follow both. Irrespective of which approach you choose to follow, it is important to plan just enough, so that you can start your execution. Ensure to set the OKRs, that would help with the right measurements, before you start the execution. The actual learning from the execution helps the team(s) to learn more about the cloud migration process, and refine it based on their organization.
Using CAST Highlight in the assessment step previously, we get the recommendation for the analyzed applications. From there, for certain workloads, we can use Migrate to Containers, to automate the containerization of suitable workloads. However, there are certain applications that require manual code changes. You have a few options for that,
- Our experts can help you get started.
- Our partners can help you
Step 4 (Measure & reiterate): Measure the progress using the predefined metrics in the previous step. Celebrate the wins. Consistently share the learnings and best practices with the developer community. Pick the next challenge
Take the next step
Tell us what you’re solving for. A Google Cloud expert will help you find the best solution.
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