Prepare Your WebShop for New Times
The world looks vastly different today than it did just a few months ago. The Corona crisis has devastated significant parts of our society, and its impact is felt on all fronts.
One of the sectors hit hard by the crisis is retail. Shopping centers are closed, and many stores have shut down. Those that remain open are experiencing reduced turnover because people are not visiting as they used to.
However, on the flip side, the Corona crisis has also paved the way for new initiatives and opportunities. Opportunities that Google Cloud technology can help transform from good ideas into concrete business initiatives.
According to a report from Price Waterhouse Cooper, people are more willing to shop online during the Corona crisis than before. This puts traditional retailers under more pressure than those who can provide goods and services online. But to create a positive online experience for customers, store systems need to keep pace.
Managing inventory, pricing, deliveries, and predicting future consumer demands, known as forecasting, are essential. With effective forecasting, businesses can make better decisions on behalf of their companies. IT company Computas specializes in developing forecasting models using machine learning and has years of experience tailoring solutions specifically for the retail industry.
“Many companies use an Excel sheet to manage their inventory. It’s cost-effective but not very efficient. Typically, it can only be used and understood by the person who created it, and it does not encourage knowledge sharing or collaboration. Additionally, it becomes quickly overwhelming when dealing with a large inventory of products,” says Senior Data Scientist at Computas, Gabriel Casas, and continues:”
“There is good forecasting software available on the market, but purchasing licenses can be expensive. Moreover, it may not be tailored to your specific business needs, making it challenging to find assistance for the precise issues you, as a business owner, encounter. The same can be said for certain cloud solutions,” Gabriel Casas explains.
At Computas, we work with the Google Cloud Platform when assisting retail companies in creating customized forecasting systems. These are systems that can be used and adapted, whether you’re aiming for improved pricing, greater margins, or need to quickly streamline your inventory before new products hit the shelves. Moreover, everyone who needs access to these systems can have it.
“With the toolbox provided by Google Cloud Platform, you can structure the knowledge and expertise within a company to build a tailored and flexible forecasting solution. In other words, you take all the wisdom and experience found in the aforementioned Excel sheets and turn it into a scalable, collaborative, and automated solution that fits perfectly with your business,” says Gabriel Casas.
However, he emphasizes that embarking on such a project involves a steep learning curve. It is not easy for any company to build a cloud-based project from scratch. That’s precisely why it’s crucial to enlist the help of experts in the field.
One of the reasons Computas excels in solutions for the retail sector is its close collaboration with Google. For many years, Google has been analyzing data from the retail industry, which is one of the six focus industries for the company. Everyone is familiar with Google’s search engine and YouTube, and the experiences gained from them have been incorporated into the solutions used to create the best e-commerce systems.
“These solutions are elastic and don’t experience blackouts. You don’t have to invest in more capacity than necessary to handle peak periods like Black Friday or the current situation where many physical stores are closed. We work with 7 out of the world’s top 10 retailers, helping them run seamless e-shops through the Google Cloud Platform,” says Henrik Hammer, a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud.
To provide e-shop owners the ability to offer a unique user experience, leveraging data is essential, and that’s where Google specializes. Many who migrate their webshops to the Google Cloud Platform and utilize the BigQuery Data Warehouse experience significantly improved performance at a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Additionally, they can analyze more data and utilize machine learning without moving the data out of their Data Warehouse, providing real-time insights into what’s happening in their webshop.
Are interested in learning more about getting started with data-driven forecasting solutions and incorporating machine learning into your business? We want to help you!
Would you like to know more?
Send us an email and we will contact you.
Rune Hagbartsen
Artificial intelligence Atlassian Automation Big data Cloud computing Confluence Data analysis Jira Jira Service Desk Jira Service Management Security Work methodology
