STEPHANIE WONG: Hi, I'm Stephanie.
And today we're going to look at how you can build a real time
inventory management system using Google Cloud Spanner.
Consumers are more digitally connected than ever before.
Expectations for omnichannel shopping experiences
across online and offline channels have increased.
Experiences like buy online, pickup in store
are expected now, rather than considered a convenience.
For a company like Maxim Modish, a fictional retailer,
in-person shopping has been the backbone of their retail model
for years.
As a premier retailer, they have hundreds of department stores
across the nation.
But to meet increasing online demands,
they've had to undergo a digital transformation.
In recent years, Maxim Modish customers
have been engaging with them through multiple channels,
online through social media, in-store, and in app.
Naturally, these customers expect a seamless experience
across all of these channels.
To better meet these expectations,
Maxim Modish needed a complete picture of their inventory flow
and real time decision making at scale.
This revealed three key challenges
they faced with their technology stack.
One, inconsistent view of data across silos.
Two, cost inefficiencies to management overhead
and seasonal scaling needs.
Three, an inability to evolve with new business needs.
This was a tough problem to solve.
They were dealing with an extremely large amount of data
requiring them to integrate event data from hundreds
of siloed data sources in a timely manner.
These inventory events were coming in rapidly
and constantly changing, resulting
in a lack of real-time consistency
across data sources.
For example, a woman's dress would show in stock
on the mobile shopping app, but the same dress showed out
of stock in the physical store.
Additionally, running their existing
on-premise infrastructure led to numerous cost inefficiencies.
To keep up with the growing volume of data
and meet seasonal scaling during times like black Friday,
they had to increase their on-prem data center
for peak capacity, which aggravated operational costs
and tied up resources managing that infrastructure.
Last, they were unable to evolve with new business needs.
Running antiquated systems, it was
difficult to adapt or modernize their applications.
Applying changes to monolithic systems
is a long, arduous process.
This is where Google Cloud helped turn things around.
Through their partnership, Maxim Modish
was able to build an inventory ledger solution with Google
Cloud Spanner at its core.
This inventory ledger solution is
modeled based on retail environments represented
as a series of events.
These events include things like items
shipped to a store, item price updates, or customer purchase
requests.
They chose Spanner to house their inventory event
ledger, which would keep track of the constant changes
to inventory.
Cloud Spanner is a managed database
with strong consistency in regional and multi-regional
setup, no downtime, and scale insurance.
It combines the best of relational semantics and scale.
In addition, Spanner is a managed service,
which frees Maxim Modish from operational overhead
of their own large scale inventory systems.
Whenever an inventory event happens,
it's placed in an append-only immutable event ledger.
This guarantees inventory changes
are recorded in the system consistently
across multiple regions.
As customers buy items across different channels,
in-store or mobile, Spanner gives them a consistent view
of the inventory no matter what region or channel the shopper
comes from.
All replicas of the inventory ledger
are kept up to date, in-sync, and quickly available.
What's more, data housed in Spanner
is easily available to other Google Cloud Services, making
it simple for Maxim Modish to leverage capabilities
like BigQuery for SQL base analytics,
Looker for modeling and reporting,
and AutoML and BigQuery ML to apply
machine learning for smarter real-time decision making.
For example, Maxim Modish is able to integrate
BigQuery to create this Looker dashboard.
They can conduct further analysis
using BigQuery as a managed data warehouse and Looker
for interactive visualizations across all stores.
By implementing this inventory ledger solution
with Cloud Spanner, Maxim Modish now
has real-time view of inventory across hundreds of data sources
and applications, the ability to scale up and down
to support peak traffic during large shopping events,
manage services which significantly decreases burdens
of operations, and the ability to modernize
and adapt to new business needs through an ecosystem
of integrated cloud services.
By leveraging just some of the powerful features of Google
Cloud, Maxim Modish is now able to do real-time decision making
for omnichannel retail and build a seamless online and offline
shopping experience for thousands of happy customers
using a single source of truth.
Check out the link here to learn more about Spanner.
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