Carrefour Belgium is building a new data cloud in collaboration with Google, that should guarantee streamlined supply chains and hyper-personalised customer experiences. The new way of working is operationally more stable, financially more interesting and also more environmentally friendly.
“Logical next step”
In Belgium, Carrefour is taking its collaboration with Google to the next level: the retailer has already been using Google Workspace since 2019 and is now turning to Google Cloud to support the next phase of its digital transformation. The SAP systems and supply chain data are moving to Google BigQuery. The new data cloud makes data and analytics more readily available to employees, enabling products to reach stores faster and more efficiently and allowing customers to enjoy a more personalised shopping experience with targeted promotional offers.
It also prepares the retailer for future projects in mobile and e-commerce, data analytics and machine learning. Recently, Carrefour announced the launch of its digital advertising platform Carrefour Links, which uses data analytics and algorithms to improve customer relations and enables suppliers to tailor personalised offers to meet customer expectations.
Coping with peaks
“We have been using Workspace for two years to encourage a collaborative culture, so for our company, this feels like a logical next step”, Chief Technology Officer Stijn Stabel says. “We already started moving some applications from our IBM data centres to Google Cloud last year, and we were very pleased with it. That is why we decided to also migrate the applications from the data centres in our stores. This way, we can consolidate them.”
Until now, each store had its own server with an in-store application. “If we centralise these, we can use larger machines, and the management becomes much more interesting, both economically and operationally: we can turn these machines off at night, and we no longer have to drive to the stores in the event of a problem, for example. Centralised machines also make it easier to deal with peaks: our business is much busier during the end-of-year period than during the summer months, after all.”
Smoother collaboration
For Carrefour’s employees, the project entails a major change. “Some people might frown upon it – which we understand – but the switch also generates enthusiasm. The risk of a decentralised approach is that everyone generates their own version of the truth. For example, think of supplier data: if you keep track of it on ten different systems and let twenty people make their own reports on it, then you end up with twenty different suppliers whose names just resemble each other – with a bit of luck. We are already reaping the benefits of this new way of working: we can work on the same data with different people simultaneously, something that Google has made perfectly possible. The deeper you get into that ecosystem, the easier it becomes to work with.”
Suppliers will notice little of the migration, Stabel thinks. On the contrary: cooperation should run more smoothly. “We used to have to send e-mails and documents back and forth. Now we can put those documents in a Google Drive, share them with external parties and work together on the same document.”
#JoinTheRetailRevolution
Franchisees will also benefit from the new system. Carrefour will be able to work more efficiently and will be able to predict buying behaviour better, so that the supply of the store is in order. This will also benefit consumers: “We intend to be able to offer the very best service at all times. With more data and better data analysis, we can respond even better to customer needs. For example, people will receive only the offers relevant to them. And if we can do our bit for the environment, everyone will benefit.”
This is a big challenge for the new IT team that has been on board at Carrefour since last year, Stabel says. “It is an exciting project and one that we are fully committed to. It is great to be able to help realise such a major transformation. I think that is the reason why we are attracting so many candidates who want to come and work for us: there are so many interesting projects in the pipeline. Groundbreaking projects with which we make a big difference, using the latest technology. We want to be top of the class.” Carrefour used to rely mainly on external teams. This year, the company plans to recruit over seventy in-house IT profiles under the hashtag #JoinTheRetailRevolution. “That is unprecedented in the industry.”
Digital hub
The collaboration between Carrefour and Google dates back to 2018, when the retailer announced it would be accelerating its digital transformation through a partnership with the technology giant. In March 2019, the two partners opened a joint digital hub in Paris, where they work on innovative projects centred around artificial intelligence and machine learning. They intend to set up an ecosystem of startups to move up a gear in terms of digital innovation.
The aim was, and still is, to guarantee shoppers a better customer experience, whether they choose to shop in a store, online, with their smartphone or by using voice commands. To create a truly digital culture within the group, the retailer is rolling out Google’s digital solutions to all of its 160,000 employees. In Belgium, for example, Carrefour equipped no fewer than 8,800 employees with a smartphone in 2019. In the stores, employees now use tablets to send through orders. The company also implemented the new HR platform SAP Successfactors, digitising recruitment and onboarding processes and training.
