ANGELO CLAYTON: My name is Angelo Clayton.
I'm the general manager in IT at Woolworths in Australia,
and I have two portfolios there.
I look after our store application landscape
across the fleet of our stores.
I'll tell you a bit about that.
And then, secondly, I look after our information management
capabilities, so our analytics and our data capability
across the group.
And the story I guess I'd like to share with you a little bit
today is really the journey that we
have gone on as an organization, with Google,
to really drive our analytics capability
within the organization.
So just before, I guess, I get into the story,
just to tell you a little bit about Woolies
and who we are as an organization.
So we're affectionately known as Woolies
by our customers in both Australia and in New Zealand.
We're probably one of the largest retailers there,
and we've really been recognized for some of our large brands.
We have our Woolworths supermarket business.
We have our Big W general merchandise business.
We provide some beer, wine, and spirits to the Australia/New
Zealand market in or BWS business,
and we have another liquor business called Dan Murphy's.
Essentially, we serve approximately 29 million
customers a week.
I look at some of the HSBC stats,
and I think we dwarf in comparison
to some of your numbers.
But essentially, we have about 200,000 staff members, again,
spread across Australia and New Zealand.
We really, as an organization, are
about putting our customers first,
really working together as a single team across our group,
and then really starting to make a difference in our community,
both in the local community and, I guess, the broader community.
So really an awesome organization
within the core fabric of Australia and New Zealand.
And really, about a year ago, we started
to talk about this thing called data, and big data,
and what it could mean to us as an organization.
And I guess as we started to go down that path,
we started to realize that data as an asset
is something that we can go and unlock
and start to drive an analytics kind of mindset
throughout our business.
And really it started with a Saturday afternoon session
with some of the senior leaders in our business, going,
what's our data ambition, and what are some of the things
that we think we can achieve with this data asset?
And I guess really as we started to unlock that strategy
and started to put down some of the capabilities we really
wanted to go after, I think we quickly realized as an IT
organization that we don't have the right platforms in place
to be able to support that ambition.
And so, really, as we sat down, we
started to articulate what are some
of those critical capabilities that we
need to put in place to be able to unlock that business
or group data strategy.
And really, one, it was about starting
to put down the capability around trusted, reliable data
that's really easily accessible.
So one of the first things I guess the business team
said to me as I joined the business was, Angelo,
we've got all of this data.
I just cannot get my hands on it.
And part of that challenge was the fact
that the data literally sat in so many different places
within the organization.
Each business unit built its siloed data warehouse.
And it was really just impossible to be
able to bring all of that data together
in a trusted and reliable fashion.
So that was kind of the first principle
we needed to go after.
Second was, how do we future-proof
this technology stack?
Knowing how the data landscape is shifting so quickly
with all the different technologies that's available,
how do we make sure that in three or five years' time,
we're on a stack that really can still service
the needs of the business?
Thirdly, from our CFO, making sure
that the platform was cost-effective.
And again, because we had so much
duplication in the organization, how
do we go about making sure that we
could drive an efficient cost model for the entire group?
Fourthly was enabling the self-service capability.
How do we make sure that once we put
the data in the hands of our teams,
that they really are able to go after the analytics themselves,
without having to come back to IT every single time
they want to be able to unlock new insights?
And then, lastly, like everyone else,
making sure our data is secure.
We have close to 9 or 10 million customers.
It is imperative that our data needs
to be in a place that's secure and only we
can get our hands on.
And so, really, that was really the stage
where we said, who should we be engaging in this market
to be able to go after this capability?
And I guess there was no other name that came to us
but Google.
Google, I guess, manages the largest data set probably
on the planet.
And it just made sense for us to start to engage with them.
And certainly, in those initial engagements,
GCP obviously came up multiple times.
And I think, as a platform, we were quite comfortable
with GCP.
I guess we were probably a little bit more
circumspect about BigQuery as a capability in the GCP stack.
And I guess because it's been maturing
over the last few years, we put a bit of a challenge to Google
and said to them, take some of our data
and see how quickly you can process it.
We gave them 80 billion rows of data.
They loaded it on the platform.
And typically, on an on-prem platform,
the queries we run against that data set
takes probably anything between 45 minutes
to an hour and a half.
They ran the queries on their platform.
It came back in--
I think, it was 2.3 seconds, to be precise.
And I think that was the start of the journey where
we sat up and said, I think there's
a capability that could support our business's ambitions.
But I guess as we started to engage with them
and really started to understand that this was a platform we
could go after, we kind of knew that there were a few more
pieces of the puzzle that we needed to put in place.
And when you're dealing with a retailer,
you've got to keep things simple.
So this was as simple a picture I
could create to be able to get the CEO and the CFO on board.
But really, very simplistically, going,
how do we make sure we take all of the data sources across
our enterprise, bring that into a single place or instance--
our data lake, essentially--
and then taking that single repository
and moving that data up into the GCP platform.
Again, at the beginning stages of having this discussion,
we were really worried about the fact
that this would probably take us three or four
years to be able to really do as an organization.
Multiple data sources, tons of integration
we'd need to build, we'd have to go and do the visualization
capability on top of that, into the Google Cloud Platform.
We just really thought this would be a long journey.
And again, started to sit down with the PS teams in Australia,
from Google, and our partner, TCS,
to start to work out how we could do this
and how quickly we could leverage it.
And essentially, these were the components
we know we needed land-- the enterprise data
lake, the integration into the GCP cloud,
and then the ability to be able to put the visualization
component of Tableau on top of that.
And again, we really managed to start
the process around the Hadoop piece pretty quickly,
and as we engaged with Google, laid another challenge to them.
Well, certainly, the CIO came to me last year, July,
and said, Angelo, I want this entire platform up
and running by the end of the year.
I said, would you like my resignation now?
But essentially, we started that journey in June
with the first of our proof of concepts.
And I guess, again, to make sure that we were future-proofing
the platform, we didn't just want
a platform that could compute.
I think we all know that GCP has the ability
to scale and compute.
I think that was a no-brainer.
It was really about the value-add
that the platform would bring over time to us.
And so not only did we do the compute piece,
we also did a lot of work around ML and some use cases
around natural language processing.
And again, as we threw the data at the platform,
it literally just came back in sub-second
on all the use cases we went after.
And so really, once we saw those use cases working,
we went back to Google again and said, guys,
we've got to move even faster.
And so in July, we commenced the build of the platform,
again working quite intuitively with them
through a DevOps and an agile model.
And really, by the end of September,
we were live on the GCP platform.
And again, full integration, all the security standards
met, we had our [? Syso, ?] who--
my word, he's probably the scariest guy on the planet,
sign off on the platform, sign off on the security.
And so, again, great collaboration with Google
on just them working with us to be able to meet our security
standards.
But while that was great and the platform was up and running,
we needed to put the enterprise visualization
tool on top of that.
And we did that by October.
But then we actually did get data into the platform.
And literally, by the end of November,
we had put our core retail data set onto the platform-- two
years' worth of history moved onto there, literally
ready for the business to be able to consume and work with.
It has been a phenomenal effort by ourselves, the Google team,
as well as TCS, our partner.
Projects like this take you two to three years
to be able to land.
And for us to be able to do this in the space of four or five
months was just an amazing, amazing effort.
Where to next for us?
So now that we've got a bulk of the data on the platform,
it is about putting the rest of the data
onto the platform, some of our customer data,
and some of the other pieces across our value chain
that we want to move into the platform.
And these are some of the use cases
we know that we can go and unlock over the coming months.
How do we do pricing promotions far more
targeted to our customers?
How do we drive localization around our range?
Again, through the insights of the data that we've got.
How do we start to really do optimization?
And we're talking to Google about this at the moment.
How do we optimize our entire value chain, again,
now that we've got the data set on the platform.
So we are super excited about the capability
that we can unlock over the coming months
now that we have this platform in place.
So I think just lastly I want to say,
again, thank you to the Google team.
It's been a phenomenal journey so far,
and we look forward to the following 12 months with you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]