In the last two decades, BHI, once a small construction company in Vernal, Utah, has expanded its operations to dozens of industries in over 25 states. But while the company grew, its technology trailed behind. File sharing and emails both ran off a single server. Editing a document was a grueling undertaking that required an employee to VPN in, patiently download the file, edit it, then upload it again—all from a job site with a limited internet connection. Acknowledging the need for better technology, BHI adopted Google Workspace and AppSheet and transformed its business to be more innovative, productive, and profitable.

Rebuilding collaboration and productivity

BHI first looked to replace its archaic email and file-sharing systems. They found that Google Workspace—as a proven and popular collaboration solution for remote teams and a familiar, preferred platform that most employees use in their personal lives—was the clear choice. BHI migrated its 500 employees to Google Workspace in less than a week. Productivity immediately soared, since employees could collaborate more easily with Google Workspace’s products and access them from any device, from anywhere—even at the construction sites.

For instance, the contract writing process drastically improved with Google Workspace. Version control had always been a struggle—as employees circulated a draft contract from one computer to the next, versions became unruly and randomized, untracked changes popped up, and files went missing. With Google Workspace, the pre-construction, legal, and finance teams can all edit and track changes of a contract from wherever they work. Version control has become a thing of the past, as everyone is always working on the latest version.

By adopting Google Workspace, BHI decentralized its operations and began collaborating in real time across over 150 job sites. Management and IT gained new insights into challenges that they may never have uncovered nor confronted without a cloud-based productivity tool. The IT team also saw an opportunity to overhaul the methods of their deskless workforce, which accounts for 90% of the company. This deskless majority needed to connect directly to the data that influenced, impacted, and comprised their work. They also required more streamlined processes. AppSheet provided the answer to the workforce’s needs, enabling IT to create applications that simplified key tasks so mobile workers could get their jobs done faster and better.

For example, one BHI client required extensive inspections multiple times a day. Before using AppSheet, a BHI inspector would perform the inspection, return to a computer, record the results from paper to a spreadsheet, copy and paste them into a formatted report in a Google Docs, convert the Doc to a PDF, and email the final inspection report to the customer. This manual process took two hours to complete. Now, using AppSheet, the inspector inputs the results on their mobile device while performing the inspection. As soon as the device connects to the internet, it automatically updates the database with the inspector’s inputs, adds the inspection results to a preformatted report built-in Google Docs, and emails the final report as a PDF to the customer. With AppSheet, BHI shortened this inspection process from two hours to six minutes, saving over $50,000 a month in labor. “With Google Workspace and AppSheet, BHI has turned into a digital company with real-time data allowing for real-time decisions, collaboration, and transparency in a decentralized environment,” says Johnny Hacking, Director of IT.

An easier software choice for faster results

BHI also found that building apps with AppSheet is much easier than using other solutions, such as developing with low- or full-code tools or purchasing third-party products. Because AppSheet is a true no-code platform, anyone can learn to build and maintain apps. Since adopting AppSheet, the BHI IT team has become so proficient with the platform that they have eliminated the company’s previous backlog of software needs. Now, when a new site opens up, IT proactively works with the site managers to understand its unique requirements in order to build a custom app. Start to finish, scoping, and building this site-specific app typically takes less than a week—compared to months with traditional development platforms. 

IT team members aren’t the only BHI employees building apps. As Hacking explains, “We have people that aren’t in IT, and when they have an idea we say hey, log into AppSheet, build it out, and then we’ll help out with some final touches on it.” 

Empowering employees outside of IT to build AppSheet apps has benefited teams across the company. For example, one team on a solar farm construction project needed to perform inspections of an array of specialized technical equipment with which IT was not familiar. In this case, the solar team, being the subject matter experts, simply built the app according to their specifications. All IT had to do was jump in at the end to help finalize the app—the final product was completely customized to the solar team’s very specific needs. This highlights the benefits of no-code development: on-the-ground experts build and prototype job-specific apps and IT puts the finishing touches on the functionality, all while keeping guardrails in place.

Using Google Workspace and AppSheet also simplifies BHI’s reliance on third-party software. “Our company divisions are so diverse that they each require different software,” says Hacking. “Plus, if we buy a third-party software, we still have to customize it by getting other software, because they don’t play well together. By replacing this software with AppSheet apps, we save a lot of money. And it’s easy to integrate those apps because on the back end, they’re all connected to Google Sheets.” 

For the few third-party software products that BHI hasn’t been able to replace, they’ve used Apps Scripts to import the software’s data into Google Sheets, so that their data all lives on one platform. Overall, BHI has been able to free up 10% of its total IT spend by replacing third-party software with Google Workspace and AppSheet apps.

Company culture transformed by technology

“Because we’ve used Google Workspace and AppSheet and it’s been so successful, people are very willing to use them,” Hacking says. “And for a construction company to gain so much trust in these platforms in such a short period of time—that’s huge. Now we’re at the point where employees are asking, ‘What else can we do?’”

Adopting Google Workspace and AppSheet has not only made BHI more productive, but also transformed the company culture. Employees feel empowered to be more innovative and are constantly seeking ways to improve. Simplifying employees’ work has led to a direct boost in morale. 

The role of IT has also transformed. As Hacking explains, “In just three years of using these technologies, IT has gone from being support overhead to being proactively brought to the table to take part in the business strategy.” Increased IT visibility and culpability has helped solve business problems and led to increased profitability. 

BHI continues to find new ways to leverage Google Workspace and AppSheet to improve business. In response to COVID, they created a timesheet app that allows employees to clock in without touching a device. Most meetings are now held virtually using Google Meet. Fleet maintenance and repairs are all managed with apps. And, of course, the company has better data and insights than ever. As Hacking puts it, “We’re continuing to stay on the cusp of innovation because of Google Workspace and AppSheet.”

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.