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Kingfisher, a global residence enchancment firm, has signed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to reinforce Kingfisher’s digital capabilities because it helps usher in retail’s subsequent digital age.
With greater than 1,500 shops internationally, 80,000 full-time colleagues, and a model portfolio that features B&Q, Castorama, Screwfix, Brico Dépôt and Koçtaş, Kingfisher required a robust companion that will enable it to innovate at a fast tempo.
By capitalising on Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform companies, and synthetic intelligence (AI) options, Kingfisher, its retail manufacturers and clients will see a bunch of advantages. These embrace higher web site uptime, higher forecasting, extra seamless customer-centric experiences, improved personalisation, and world-class engineering assist from Google Cloud.
Kingfisher can also be one of many largest SAP enterprise customers in Europe and is already migrating on-premise legacy workloads to Google Cloud. This is unlocking sooner and extra versatile entry to its present knowledge because it prepares for the digital future. At the identical time, Google Cloud’s open method will enable Kingfisher to proceed with its multicloud technique.
The partnership with Google Cloud stems from a transparent alignment of product-first values, with each organisations prioritising consumer expertise, led by engineering innovation. Adopting Google Cloud applied sciences will enable Kingfisher to streamline its present e-commerce platform, whereas experimenting with superior testing environments at a lot decrease price. This will present the liberty, pace, and worth it wants to reply extra successfully to shifting market circumstances, and to proceed providing first-class customer support throughout its manufacturers.
JJ Van Oosten, chief digital and expertise officer at Kingfisher, mentioned: “At Kingfisher, we have an ambitious technology strategy in place. Google Cloud is an engineering organisation at its heart, while simultaneously understanding the complex retail landscape. As we look to the next phase of growth and the kind of talent we want to attract, this meeting of minds was a real draw for us.
“To reach our goal of creating a world-class engineering centre, we need a technology stack that will support us to experiment and move quickly. Google Cloud is helping to position us as a true digital leader, and our global teams and customers will benefit as a result.”
Kingfisher already has important digital innovation plans underway. Projects for this new partnership will embrace replatforming the Screwfix e-commerce website to make it one-hundred occasions sooner, which is able to improve its skill to ship on the quickest non-food supply service worldwide. Meanwhile, the B&Q model will now have the ability to scale up from 300,000 merchandise on-line to greater than 4 million within the coming years, because of the expansion of its on-line market.
In addition, Kingfisher plans to create a brand new, real-time order system that may vastly enhance inventory accuracy, and deploy visible search utilizing Google Cloud AI instruments to assist clients uncover the product replacements that almost all carefully match their wants.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, mentioned: “We’re proud to work with Kingfisher to optimise, speed up, and develop its ambitions. Partnering with world retail leaders like Kingfisher to assist create even higher in-store and on-line buying experiences for patrons is a key indicator of the facility of the cloud to digitally rework retail.
Google Cloud and Kingfisher have already begun work collectively, with a roadmap to place the Group as a digital chief.