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.”
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Video: How Did GANT Get Products to Market in Just Three Months?
It was in 1949 that a Ukranian immigrant Berl Gantmacher launched–what was going to be an iconic shirt-making company–GANT in Connecticut, America.
Since then, the company has reinvented shirts every single day. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, GANT operates in 70 countries.
In 2017, GANT wanted to launch a flagship store in London. It takes most companies a year to open a store, considering the amount of cross country collaboration and planning that’s needed for a store to take off.
In order to open the store in London, teams from three countries—Sweden, Portugal and the UK—needed to work together.
“Right away through the process, we moved forward as one team with one goal. With G Suite we have access to all information in one place and we collaborate on Hangout. A flagship store could be well over a year. Regent Street (London) was three months. A very, very different timeline. It’s been an amazing success for the company,” says Matthew Wood, Creative Director, GANT.
G Suite made it possible for the various teams from different countries to collaborate on a single platform and launch a flagship store in just three months—instead of a year.
Report on API-led Digital Transformations in 2020 and the Future
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In 2020, many businesses across industries turned their focus and investments towards digital strategies. APIs being an integral part of every organization’s digital disruption, will grow in relevance throughout 2021. Read the report to gain more insights on driving API-led digital transformations and in-depth analysis of Google Cloud’s Apigee API Management Platform usage data, case studies and third-party surveys conducted with tech leaders.
Vodafone Turns to Google Maps Platform to Expand and Improve its Network
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Vodafone India had a manual, labor-intensive process for determining network capabilities and reach. The company sent field operatives to every customer location to conduct a feasibility study. These feasibility studies help Vodafone determine whether they can provide connectivity and services to customers based on the infrastructure at that location.
Everyone from the IT team and end users to the field operatives doing the work recognized the need to adopt a new solution to automate the measurements. They needed a technology that was easy to use and maintain.
“Vodafone used to manually perform physical surveys for each feasibility, which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Often, feasibility studies were delayed, and we missed out on opportunities to serve additional customers. With SmartFeasibility, we’ve increased our capacity 15 fold, which positively impacts our bottom line and allows us to provide better and smarter customer service.”
—Rajneesh Asthana, IT Planning and Delivery, Vodafone India
Partnering with Lepton Software (a leading global provider of location-based analytics solution) Vodafone introduced SmartFeasibility—a solution that changed the feasibility testing from a manual to an automated process. This involved a full Google geo platform solution – leveraging world class technology like maps, roads and directions.
Google Maps Platform Results
- Employees are able to access information faster with SmartFeasibility—they have data at their fingertips, rather than waiting for an employee to collect it
- Field operatives have increased their conversion rates by providing more accurate readings on feasibilities and closing more customer business
- Addresses are now easy to find with a click of a button. The Vodafone India team can search feasibilities that have been loaded into the database, so if there’s an issue or if they need to reference a past action, they have that information at their fingertips
- 2 day turnaround versus 5 before the solution was implemented
- 400+ new customers added per day
With the new solution, Vodafone India no longer needs field operatives to manually calculate these measurements. With Google Maps, users can search customers’ addresses, calculate the distance between Vodafone’s location and the customer’s location and research building data such as height.
The old system of having field operatives collect data was unreliable. With Google Maps Platform, the Vodafone India team knows that the measurements are accurate and reliable.
Customer Stories: Ocado
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Ocado is the world’s largest online-only grocery store. But Ocado isn’t your typical corner grocery store. For one thing, there’s no corner as we’re an online-only grocery retailer reaching British households, and now with a fast-growing non-food business alongside. Our customers shop online using our award-winning webshop or mobile apps and then their orders are picked and packed in one of our huge automated warehouses, the largest of their kind in the world; hours later, our vans deliver to their kitchens in one-hour delivery slots.
Google Workspace allows us to do things our way, wherever and whenever we want. Our staff use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive to stay on top of their day to day work, and Google+ is helping our teams stay in touch, share information and build local communities. Ultimately, all of these tools help to make sure our customers get the groceries they order, on time and in the best possible condition.
But we didn’t stop there. We looked at other ways we could use Google’s technology to help us run our business and started using Google App Engine for building internal applications. For example, we used App Engine to create a new version of our “Where’s My Order” application, which our customers will soon be using to find out where their orders are within our production cycle. Once their order is on the road, the integration with Google Maps allows them to see exactly where their delivery van is. So we’re taking what used to be a chore, grocery shopping, and making it a simple experience that you can do from the convenience of your own home, or wherever you may be.
Our most recent project was on Google Compute Engine. Within our warehouses there are certain tasks that are repetitive and arduous for humans to do, like picking heavy six packs of bottled water into customer orders. So our robotics team is developing solutions that use robots to automate these sorts of tasks and thus release staff for other more important work. But these robots need sophisticated 3D vision systems to enable them to see what they are doing. These are very computationally intensive applications and by providing the instantly flexible and scalable computing power to crunch all those numbers, Compute Engine provided the perfect solution. And, we are already using the cloud to store and process some of the huge volumes of data that our business spits out every minute.
But with an eye to future growth and international expansion, we have plans to use Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to move other parts of our production systems to the cloud. So walk into an Ocado warehouse in the future and you might run into a robot if you’re not careful. Like I said, we’re not your typical corner grocery store.
*Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite
Google Cloud CCAI’s Support for the Public Sector Soars during the Pandemic
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Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection
Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve partnered with government organizations and academic institutions to serve communities at scale with Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI). I sat down with Bill MacKenzie, IT liaison for the Upper Grand School District in Ontario, and Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization, to discuss how they embraced CCAI to introduce scalable service delivery to residents and students alike. I’m sharing more on their stories below, and for the full overview, check out our Google Cloud Public Sector Summit session, Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection.
Upper Grand School District: Answering questions with speed and accuracy
Bill MacKenzie described the Upper Grand School District’s struggles at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly helping parents with IT issues. The staff-oriented help desk was not equipped to assist parents trying to securely login for students as young as kindergarten. Without sufficient support for parents, the District was struggling to handle thousands of phone calls a day.
To alleviate the manual strain, they turned to Quantiphi, a Google Cloud partner, to implement Google Cloud Dialogflow. They were fully functional within a few weeks. The new website provided real-time responses as well as clear documentation to help parents get up and running quickly.
“In the first 10 days, we had over 5,000 hits, and the accuracy rate was 92%,” MacKenzie said.
The district doesn’t know what the future holds, but now that they have been through the process, they are confident they now understand how to create their own bots to meet critical needs.
City of Toronto: Getting critical information to the community
Marco Palermo explained how the city of Toronto was facing a very rapid and fluid situation at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information to constituents was extremely important, and they needed alternative channels to deliver that information.
Toronto has been committed to workforce equity and inclusivity in order to best represent the diversity of its residents. As a result, solutions had to be accessible to all. The bot handled 25,330 unique users and addressed 20,174 total questions with an 80% accurate response rate in the first four months. It’s been a huge success for the city, with plans to expand its capabilities.
Personalized response to the pandemic challenge
I noted that even before the pandemic, government leaders were asking for a way to provide more flexible personal experiences and better support outside of normal business hours. Around 60% of constituents want more self-service options and 75% would happily interact with digital resources if they could get the answers they needed.
Google Cloud CCAI addresses these needs with a single core of intelligence that provides a consistently high-quality conversational experience—human or virtual—across all channels and platforms. It can be deployed on legacy infrastructure without upgrades in an average of two weeks.
CCAI operates with a conversational core that centralizes the ability to talk, understand, and interact, orchestrating high-quality conversations at scale. It provides services in three different ways:
- Virtual Agent AI allows natural conversation with customers to identify and address their issues effectively
- Agent Assist AI helps human agents by providing real-time turn-by-turn guidance so they can better serve constituents
- Insight AI determines metrics and trends in real-time to enable faster and more accurate insights
CCAI provides consistency across every application. It can go off-script when answering complex questions, adjusting human conversation with the capacity to handle unexpected stops and starts, odd word choices, or implied meanings. It can also handle multiple use cases for the customer, such as taking payments, updating information, providing information, and more. By allowing agencies to automate routine tasks and reduce the amount of time employees need to dedicate to answering calls, the solution created cost savings for the agency.
Explore more on this session by visiting the Public Sector Summit on-demand video.
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