Architecting a retail startup with Google Cloud

foreign [Music] Khan a scale customer engineer in emea and we welcome you back to the technical guide for startups where we are creating a series of videos for technical enablement to start build and grow your businesses successfully and sustainably on Google Cloud in our previous videos we talked about accelerating model development with mlops where you learned how to implement mlops on Google cloud with Solutions like vertex AI and today we will be talking about architecting a retail startup on Google Cloud here's what the agenda looks like for today first we will take a quick look at what is a typical retail life cycle then we will discuss how does Google Power your retail business later we will know more about how you can accelerate the retail life cycle with Google further we will be taking look at an architecture solving for retail followed by a demo we will then conclude by showing you how startup customers are successfully utilizing different solutions within Google Cloud to solve for their retail problems so let's get started first up we need to understand what the retail life cycle is and how different processes contribute to a complete retail experience but let's take a closer look at the retail lifecycle and discuss the six main stages first along with their Associated challenges an entrepreneurial spirit is the foundation of any retail startup idea it is a recognition of an opportunity to fulfill a need or want of customers and this inspiration and recognition of the target audience is what drives entrepreneurs to create new and Innovative products and services so naturally the first stage is logistics and supply chain where the product is designed manufactured and delivered to the store the stage presents challenges like Inventory management supplier management and supply chain visibility next is strategy and planning where retailers decide on their pricing marketing and distribution strategies the challenges here include creating a competitive strategy understanding market trends and identifying the right target audience merchandising is the stage where products are displayed in the store and pricing and promotion strategies are executed challenges include selecting the right products managing inventory levels and creating appealing displays for products store operations is a stage where products are sold and returned if they're damaged or stolen challenges include managing inventory levels optimizing checkout processes and minimizing loss prevention marketing is the stage which retailers promote their products to customers challenges include creating compelling marketing campaigns identifying the right channels and tracking Roi and finally we have customer experience where customers interact with the product challenges include creating a shopping experience providing exceptional customer service and managing returns and exchanges by understanding and addressing the challenges associated with each stage of the retail lifecycle retailers can improve their operations enhance the customer experience and ultimately Drive sales and growth the covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of e-commerce by four to six years leading to a rapid shift in the world of omnichannel retail this shift has resulted in an explosion of data across multiple business functions including advertising data supply chain data pricing Data customer loyalty and much more as more retail activity takes place online the amount of data being generated is growing at an unprecedented rate retailers now who have access to a wealth of data that can help them make Better Business decisions but they must also find ways to effectively manage and analyze this data however managing all of this data can be challenging retailers must invest in the right tools and Technology to ensure that they can effectively manage and analyze this data by doing so they can gain valuable insights that can help them stay ahead of the competition by doing so they can gain valuable insights that can help them stay ahead of the competition even in the midst of a rapidly shifting Retail Landscape in today's Retail Landscape data is more important than ever before retailers who use data effectively can optimize Logistics fulfillment and delivery improve merchandising and assortment streamline store operations enhance the omnichannel experience for their customers and improve customer acquisition and retention by leveraging data retailers can get insights into their customers preferences and behaviors which can help them personalize their shopping experience and build stronger relationships with their customers while identifying key customer Relationships by utilizing third-party data streams they can also use data to optimize their supply chain and inventory management ensuring that they always have the right products in stock additionally data can help retailers improve their Logistics and delivery processes ensuring that orders are fulfilled quickly and accurately and by analyzing data on store operations retailers can identify opportunities to streamline processes and reduce costs overall data is a key driver of digital transformation for retailers helping them to stay competitive and meet the changing needs of their customers in today's rapidly evolving Retail Landscape let's take a quick look at how does Google Power your retail business as the industry transitions into the new normal it's really important to have the right partner in this journey Google for retail is a complete set of retail specific Solutions across one Google ready to use AI tools that you can use without building from scratch from consumer products like Google Maps assistant and Google search to Enterprise great products like Google analytics Google workspace and ads Etc we believe in transforming your business by applying technology from across Google our products help enhance productivity and collaboration by enabling everyone from store associates to HQ teams to drive Innovation for you Google Cloud's retail capabilities span across key areas such as customer experience associate or employee experience supply chain and sustainability store modernization and Enterprise infrastructure modernization in partnership with Google retailers benefit from a cloud platform that is strategically Allied to the industry with Executives coming from Deep retail industry backgrounds driving decisions and solutions retailers gets access to the same technology and infrastructure that power Google's many diverse platforms such as search YouTube Maps Etc in a nutshell the best of Google's Ai and ml expertise and Engineering power we are operating the cleanest cloud in the industry a key initiative that can help align value with our customers we have eliminated all of our carbon Footprints since our founding in 1998 a first of any company our size we have matched a hundred percent of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases since 2017 which includes the electricity to power Google Cloud consumers are engaging with Google across a multitude of platforms to start research and complete their shopping Journeys by collaborating with Google you can lean into this data and this one Google expertise we give you access to the same technology that we are known for imagine the searches views and volume of data and users that happen every day we use the same infrastructure expertise for you with that said let's talk about how you can accelerate the retail lifecycle with the help of Google Cloud as a business continues to gather vast amounts of data it becomes increasingly important to have a platform that can make sense of this information and provide useful insights Google Cloud enables data modernization by connecting data under one platform to power omnichannel insights for example data flow connects your business and disparate data with bigquery allowing multiple silos to integrate to a single warehouse and analytics engine this way retailers can power omnichannel insights and end-to-end business intelligence to optimize each stage of the retail lifecycle one of the primary areas where these insights can be useful is in marketing and media by utilizing Google Cloud's platform marketeers can help optimize their marketing spend ensuring that they are reaching their target audience and getting the most out of their advertising budget merchandising and planning is another area where these insights can be incredibly valuable with the help of Predictive Analytics businesses can make better assortment decisions ensuring that they have the right products in stock at the right time by connecting data under one platform Google Cloud helps enable businesses to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their operations this understanding can lead to better decision making and ultimately improved performance as businesses continue to grow the amount of customer data they collect can increase exponentially however this data is often stored in various data silos making it difficult for organizations to gain a holistic view of their customers this is where Google Cloud can help Google Cloud allows you to break down data silos and bring all your customer data together in a single place creating a customer data platform this platform helps enable you to visualize and share real-time insights across your organization helping you to personalize marketing and customer experiences bringing data together from various data silos is just the first step of your data Journey once all this data is together in a single place you need to transform it to be ready for analysis and run analysis to generate relevant insights from it this is where Google Cloud's data transformation and analytics tools come in handy by using Google Cloud's tools you can generate valuable insights that help you create better experiences for your customers Additionally you can activate those insights across your organization helping you to make better decisions and drive better results [Music] using Google Cloud Technologies to Institute a customer data platform can help your organization to break down data silos gain a holistic view of your customers visualize and share real-time insights personalized marketing and customer experiences while generating relevant insights and activating those insights across your organization retail analytics is crucial for retailers to gain insights into customer Behavior sales performance inventory management and more looker provides retailers with the tools to power a multitude of data experiences from Modern business intelligence and embedded analytics to workflow Integrations and custom data apps looker is a powerful data visualization and analytics platform that enables retailers to create unique data experiences for Next Level business analytics with looker you can create integrated end-to-end data visualizations that give you a complete picture of your business performance you can also create customizable data experiences that can be used anywhere allowing you to access and analyze data from any device looker uses bigquery for data querying enabling modern bi and analytics ml powered insights data-driven workflows and custom applications this means that retailers can query vast amounts of data quickly and easily generate insights and predictive models and use those insights to optimize business performance Lookers ml powered insights enable retailers to leverage machine learning to automatically detect patterns and Trends in their data these insights help retailers to optimize your marketing campaigns pricing strategies and inventory management in addition looker enables retailers to create data-driven workflows automating data collection analysis and Reporting this allows retailers to save time and focus on driving business results finally looker enables retailers to create custom applications that meet their specific needs these applications can be embedded into existing workflows providing retailers with the tools they need to succeed let's talk about demand forecasting with Vortex AI on Google cloud and how to improve your supply chain planning and optimized purchasing and Merchandising as you know demand forecasting is the process of predicting future demand for a product or service it's a critical part of any business as it helps you ensure that you have the right products in stock at the right time but demand forecasting can be a complex and time consuming process that's where Google Cloud comes in with Google Cloud you can use vertex AI to help automate and improve your demand forecasting process Vortex AI is a suite of machine learning tools that can be used to build and deploy machine learning models for a variety of tasks including demand forecasting what x AI forecasting is a powerful tool that can help you improve your demand forecasting accuracy significantly it does this by automatically processing your data and evaluating hundreds of different model architectures what xci forecasting also makes it easy to deploy your models and get predictions so if you're looking for a way to improve your demand forecasting Google cloud is a great option with vertex AI forecasting you can automate and improve your process and get more accurate predictions Google Cloud can help you improve your merchandising Decisions by providing insights into which products are selling well and which products are not this can help you place products in the right locations and promote them in the right way modernizing the digital Commerce experience with Google Cloud helps enable reflectations and help increase Revenue across their digital properties our customers can innovate quickly by engaging with us in a model that works best for them from building your own platform on Google Cloud directly to working with one of our partners or any out of the box options within all these options you will unlock scalability reliability and security needed to deliver always on personalized experiences for your Shoppers the goal is to enable retailers to offer always on digital Commerce experiences making discoverability and purchasing products a frictionless experience for their customers with additional Solutions available on Google Cloud such as Vision product search recommendations Ai and Retail search retailers can offer a better customer experience that drives conversion and revenue growth due to ever increasing customer expectations retailers now have to reimagine adopt and transform all parts of their businesses to stay competitive apigee helps solve the problem raised by inconsistencies across multiple channels within retail by handling mediation for API traffic across all channels offering a standardized API interface to the consuming applications and partners while decoupling those digital touch points from the retailers back-end systems this helps drive speed to Market by allowing rapid changes to both front and back-end systems the right policies can be applied to all the API traffic such as rate limiting quotas or the authentication and authorization of client systems and end users Rich visibility established for monitoring and Reporting how apis are being consumed retailers using apogee are focused on ensuring a consistent experience by making data digital capabilities available as apis that are leveraged across all the channels this means having consistent assortment consistent inventory and availability consistent pricing and having the same set of capabilities at each digital touch point Frontline workers form the backbone of your company they are often the first people customers connect with the people who build the products welcome the customers fulfill the order or answer their service call with a large Workforce and high turnover retail operators have a lot to manage but you can keep the focus on customers by empowering your Associates with Google workspace Frontline Behind the Scenes you can easily use Google workspace Frontline to streamline onboarding and training for your employees on ground by using drive to upload launch videos campaigns promotions Etc simply use it to manage everything with ease whether it's to audit ongoing emails or Pia data in Gmail use forms to digitize product recalls time of requests supplier orders Etc or simply create a dynamic schedule using sheets and calendar together to assign tasks Google workspace Frontline gives the retail Frontline workers what they need to get the work done all in one place it enables people to move between chat video calling and content basically everything they need to get the work done on the move over the last two years we have helped our customers around the world to meet the demands and needs of their contact centers from 24 7 self-service with virtual agents to reducing average handling time and increasing csat with our agent assist to analytics that scaled with insights every industry and every moment we help across all channels by providing a unified platform to build on at the core of our conversational AI is technology that helps enable a conversation with a machine that is as good as a human interaction for an example speech to text speech recognition understands what customers are saying regardless of how they phrase things what vocabulary they use or what accent they have Text-to-Speech allows us to respond to the customers in a natural human-like manner that pushes the conversation along and then dialogue floor understands a customer's intent and determines the appropriate Next Step sap on Google Cloud can help retailers power Next Level intelligent operations with flexibility and scalability of the cloud most Enterprise data sits in sap While most operational and iot data sits in siled systems so by operating sap on Google Cloud you can connect your data processes and equipments to power more intelligent business operations which means you can unify data from sap sales and marketing systems and multiple external sources on Google Cloud to uncover analyze and democratize insights with bigquery and data q a or leverage Google's AIML to harness sap data and fuel use cases from Vision AI to Dynamic pricing or simply get ml empowered Data Insights through combing sap and bigquery data lakes with self-service smart analytics based on lookup flexibility control and manage your operations on Google clouds secure scalable and open infrastructure by using solver empower the planning optimizers of sap ibp with continuous operational optimization capabilities to have an end-to-end visibility in retail business we need to have a digital representation of the physical supply chain in a digital world think about the amount of data that is available it's huge and there are always going to be challenges with that data you can digitize it but you have to be able to operate knowing that it's not going to be 100 clean the key is layering Intelligence on top of it which allows you to work with perfect and imperfect data both Supply chains are really complex there are a lot of different players involved we need to be able to operate within and within ecosystem of Partners isvs system integrators Etc by operating with them we can bring more success in the supply chain world now the question is how do we make this happen we want to leverage tools that are available to make their supply chain more applicable Google Cloud's digital supply chain twin is designed to help businesses manage their supply chain it uses real-time data to create a virtual representation of the supply chain which further than can be used to make decision about inventory Logistics and transportation the dsct also help businesses identify and address potential problems in the supply chain it starts with retailers data all your information about your products sales catalog information and marketing even seasonal events and proportional information and further information about stores and distribution centers depending on what you want to predict for the information is then used to create your forecast only you can then utilize Google's proprietary ml models available through vertex AI which are specifically designed for demand forecasting for many businesses data science team and business planner function in separate lanes and when you're using sophisticated modeling techniques it can be hard for business users to learn and Trust data science forecast with explainable AI and local bi tools we are making it easier to bridge this Gap so that business planners can easily compare our recommendation with forecast based on their previous approaches understand influencing factors and also be able to do better post forecast analysis and evaluation so you know what net revenue impact you have managing applications across Cloud environments can be challenging and complex enthos Google Cloud's new open platform lets you run an application anywhere simply flexibly and securely embracing Open Standards supports running applications unmodified on either an existing on-premises Hardware Investments or in the public cloud anthos is a 100 software based solution which means you can get your applications up and running on your existing Hardware with no Force stack refresh and post leverages open apis which gives you the freedom to modernize your applications at any place anytime and at your own pace now because enthus is based on gke which is Google's kubernetes engine you automatically get all the latest features and security patches without having to do anything yourself anthon Springs Google expertise and knowledge in application modernization and management to our customers anthos is one consistent platform to modernize Legacy applications and build new ones in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment you can ultimately use enthos to move faster and to connect your Enterprise technology with your business operations removing the cumbersome and time consuming management of applications that typically occurs across Legacy systems or multi-cloud environments Google product Discovery Solutions bring expertise flexibility personalization and Innovation to your digital shopping experiences for example you can simply benefit from Google's advanced search capabilities to provide Google quality search that is configurable to meet your end user needs or simply perform scale at search by leveraging users shopping history to enhance shopping experiences and increase your conversion now you can better understand your Shoppers search intent and context to provide high quality search results to find products on e-commerce websites and mobile application with Google Cloud recommendations AI retailers can deliver highly personalized product recommendations at scale or simply use Google Cloud's Vision to engage customers by enabling your customers to shop based on visual images and more so to sum it all up Google Cloud brings unique advantages as a cloud platform these advantages include speed scale and adaptability we enable exceptional digital experiences during Peak shopping periods without sacrificing performance or reliability we provide premium support experiences to help reduce customer anxiety and share operational fade by collaborating closely with your engineering teams culture of innovation our retail experts work side by side video teams to solve your biggest challenges in unique ways access to Google Cloud's engineering analytics and security Talent helps Drive Innovation throughout your organization highest quality AI enamel are Advanced embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities help you optimize product assortment improve Supply chains and drive Customer Loyalty across the retail value chain utilize Google products integrate with YouTube shopping gpay Google assistant and maps to better serve your customers online and in store while increasing engagement and conversions end-to-end security you own your data we will never use it for any purpose other than those necessary to fulfill our contractual or legal obligations we offer industry-leading controls to prevent unauthorized access to your data committed to openness and choice our multi-cloud and open source Solutions protect your business from vendor login only pay for what you use and benefit from average savings of up to 57 on workloads which is automatically applied based on monthly usage and by prepaying for resources at discounted rates a huge Advantage for managing peak season shopping events here is a simple architecture for an ETL export transform load pipeline using Google Cloud to ingest your business's data from various sources and then utilize it in enriched data experiences so on the left side of the architecture you ingest business data from sources like Google ads YouTube ads Google analytics for your retail website and much more this data then is ingested into a data Lake in Google Cloud Storage in various formats from here onwards we utilize data flow to transform this data for ingestion into our data warehouse so data flow is a fully managed streaming analytics service that minimizes latency processing time and cost through Auto scaling and batch processing once data is transformed it is moved into bigquery which is a serverless cost effective and multi-cloud data warehouse designed to help you turn Big Data into valuable business insights great so now that we've Consolidated data from multiple sources into bigquery we have a plethora of options on how to utilize this data to enhance our retail startups operational workflows in a data driven manner for instance we can utilize looker which is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that helps you explore analyze and share real-time business analytics easily you create modern bi and analytics solutions from our business data or we can use this data for integrated insights and Reporting data-driven workflows for instance mlai workflows such as forecasting or dynamic real-time alerting to enable you to take more informed decisions in lesser time and finally to utilize this data in your retail applications or websites to provide experience like tailored recommendations or faster and more secure checkout for your customers now let's look at a demo of building an e-commerce recommendation system by using bigquery ml for this Demo's reference we are using a sample Google analytics data set which is available publicly in our documentation as well so let's start first by creating a new data set and for that open the bigquery page in Google Cloud console in the Explorer panel select the project where you want to create the data set expand the actions option and click on create data set on the create data set page for dataset ID type the name of the data set that you want to use for this Demo's reference we are using the name bqml for data location choose whatever location is closest to you and then click create data set once the data set is created in the query editor pane you run a SQL statement to copy a subset of the Google analytics sample data into a new table and then populate the client ID field which you will use as the key to aggregate implicit user feedback in the next step run the SQL statement to create a table containing the training data run the version that uses client ID field as the key if you plan to export data to Analytics 360. run the version that uses full visited ID field as the key if you plan to use the data with other Marketing Systems then run the create model SQL statement to create train and deploy The Matrix factorization model after training completes the trained model is deployed as bqml dot retailer underscore recommender use the ml dot recommend SQL function to get predictions from the deploybq ml dot retail underscore recommender model run the SQL statement to get the top 5 prediction for all of your users this generates generally a large amount of rows so this output is first written to a table and then the 10 records are retrieved so you can see an example of the data after you have the recommendations how you make them available to your production pipeline depends heavily on your use case you can either use a bi tool like looker for further analysis or simply explore the data more by downloading in CSP format to a cloud storage bucket for this Demo's reference we have used looker for exploring the data further by simply clicking the option explore with local Studio and once the data is in record Studio you can further explore your data by using interactive dashboards and reports that Inspire smarter business decisions with that we end our demo time to look into customer success stories together Lush migrated its Global e-commerce site to Google cloud in 22 days significantly improving their reliability and stability of its site Auto scaling allows Lush to automatically scale its infrastructure up or down to meet demand which helps to improve availability during Peak loads migrating to Google cloud has helped Lush to reduce its infrastructure costs by up to 40 percent Google's high quality private network has helped Lush to streamline its data center usage from 5 down to three Lush handles its first Boxing Day with no instability or outages thanks to its migration to Google Cloud want to know where to learn more about Google Cloud's retail Solutions scan the QR code or click the link in descriptions to learn more as a first step you can learn more about how Google Cloud AI Solutions can help you leverage business intelligence second you can learn more about featured products for the retail industry and how our customers are using them you can also talk with an expert by reaching out to our Solutions engineers and finally you can look into how our partners can support you on your Google Cloud Journey coming up in our next session we will be covering modern Isaac with anthos hybrid connectivity networking followed by a deep dive into architecting a healthcare and Life Sciences startup with Google cloud and then moving forward towards the end of grow series with a rap video of grow series and what we have covered in the journey and that's a wrap don't forget to like And subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on the Bell icon below to get notified each time a new video is posted thank you and stay tuned for our next video [Music]

2023-09-30 23:47

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