[MUSIC PLAYING]
SAMUEL MOSES: Hey, there he is.
Hey, Abdul.
ABDUL RAZACK: Hey, Sam.
Good to see you again.
We're really excited to talk to you, Sam.
SAMUEL MOSES: It's my pleasure, Abdul.
SPEAKER: It's The Home Depot, take one.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[RUMBLING]
ABDUL RAZACK: What's your role at Home Depot?
What do you do?
SAMUEL MOSES: Yes, absolutely, Abdul.
But, first, let me say thank you to you
and thank you to the Google Cloud team
for giving us this opportunity.
My name is Sam Moses.
I'm Vice President of Corporate Systems at The Home Depot.
My responsibility includes both financial as well as
HR systems.
ABDUL RAZACK: So tell us a little bit
about The Home Depot.
SAMUEL MOSES: Sure, absolutely.
The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement
retailer.
We opened up our first stores in 1979 with the focus
really on two core customers, our DIY customer,
who's our Do-It-Yourself customer, as well
as our pro customer.
Think about professionals-- carpenters, electricians,
construction, et cetera.
All across North America, we operate about 2,300 stores
in Mexico, Canada, as well as in the US.
ABDUL RAZACK: That's great, Sam.
How is The Home Depot approaching
one of the key transformational initiatives, interconnected
retail?
SAMUEL MOSES: Yeah, absolutely love
to talk about interconnected retail.
It's actually one of the things that attracted me most
to The Home Depot.
So many companies were focused on omnichannel experiences
and omnichannel retail.
What I love about what we've done here at The Home Depot
is we were actually focused on what
we call interconnected retail.
When we re-engineered our systems,
we actually re-engineered them in a way
that we put the customer in the center of that activity,
really enabling the customer to shop whenever, however,
and wherever they wanted to shop.
This caused us to look at both our in-store experiences as
well as our online experiences and begin
to blend those two into one overall experience
that we like to call the One Home Depot experience.
ABDUL RAZACK: That's great, Sam.
The Home Depot has been a leading retailer
that has successfully digitally transformed their business.
How has your partnership with Google Cloud, especially
around data and analytics, contributed to that success?
SAMUEL MOSES: It's a really good question.
Google Cloud has been a great partner for us
as we've been executing on our One Home Depot strategy
that I just mentioned.
Over the years we've actually accomplished a lot together.
Believe it or not, at The Home Depot,
working together with Google Cloud,
we were actually one of the first major brick-and-mortar
retailers to move our entire e-commerce onto the Google
Cloud platform.
In addition, last year, we started
migrating our SAP system onto the Google Cloud, so a lot
that's been accomplished.
Now, when you ask specific, Abdul, to data and analytics,
we migrated our enterprise data warehouse to BigQuery,
and this shift in technical expertise
has been huge for us in enabling us to meet and hopefully exceed
our customers' needs.
ABDUL RAZACK: That's awesome, Sam.
Any specific examples that stand out?
SAMUEL MOSES: Yeah, sure.
You know, just as an example, our reliance
from a standpoint on data and analytics,
as our reliance has increased, we've
had to really go focus in, again,
on how do we strive to just exceed
that expectation of our customers.
One of the areas that we focused on, as an example,
in financial planning and analysis,
we leveraged BigQuery to generate reports,
to build forecasts, as well as to analyze our business.
Another example that I can share with you
in how we leverage and use BigQuery
is within our supply chain analytics area,
to do forecasting the product demand,
as well as to estimate supplier lead times.
And there's a whole lot more that we're doing together
from a data and analytics standpoint,
but thanks for the question.
ABDUL RAZACK: Yeah, that's great.
What's next on the data front?
Where do you intend to drive these capabilities?
SAMUEL MOSES: What's next for us?
As the world's largest home improvement retailer,
one of the things we know is that change is inevitable
and that retail moves really, really fast.
We've seen more retail chains in the last four years
than we probably have seen in the last 40 years.
So for us to keep up with this change,
one of the things we like to do is
we like to gain insights from our customers
and from our front-line associates.
But when you ask me about data, one
of the things that we like to do is really
to use data and analytics to hopefully get ahead
of some of those things that our customers are asking for.
So what's next for us?
We're looking for, really, to continue to strive
and to exceed expectations with partners just like Google
Cloud to help us achieve our One Home Depot
strategy so we can go out and help doers get more done.
ABDUL RAZACK: Thank you for doing this again, Sam.
That was fantastic insights.
Next time, let's do this in person.
SAMUEL MOSES: Abdul, I'll take you up on that as soon
as we can possibly do that.
I'd love to meet you in person.
See you next time.