Need for qualified IT accelerates Cloud adoption plans
Kingfisher Plc, an international home improvement company, has entered into a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to enhance Kingfisher's digital capabilities as it helps usher in the following digital age of retail. With over 1,500 international stores, 80,000 full-time colleagues, and a brand portfolio that includes B&Q, Castorama and Screwfix, Kingfisher needed a strong partner that would allow it to innovate quickly by leveraging.
By partnering with Google Cloud infrastructure platform services and AI solutions, Kingfisher retail brands and customers would benefit greatly. Such benefits include excellent site uptime, better forecasting, a smoother, more customer-centric user experience, enhanced customisation, and world-class project support from Google Cloud.
Kingfisher also happens to be one of the most significant enterprise users of SAP in Europe and is already migrating legacy workloads on-premises to Google Cloud. This opens up more flexible access to existing data and prepares for the digital future. At the same time, the open access of Google Cloud allows Kingfisher to follow a multi-cloud strategy.
Partnership
The partnership with Google Cloud is based on a clear understanding of product core values, and both organisations prioritise user experience driven by innovative design.
The implementation of Google's cloud technologies allows Kingfisher to streamline the current e-commerce platform and, at the same time, experiment with advanced testing environments at a much lower cost. This gives it the freedom, speed, and value to respond more effectively to changing market conditions and continue delivering high-quality customer service to all brands.
JJ Van Oosten, Digital & Technology Director at Kingfisher, said: "We have an ambitious technology strategy at Kingfisher. Google Cloud is engineering at its core, understanding the complex retail landscape."
To achieve the goal of creating a world-class engineering centre, Kingfisher needed technology to support their experimentation and rapid development. Google Cloud will help position them as digital leaders, and their global teams and customers will benefit from it.
Kingfisher already has significant digital innovation plans underway. Its projects in the new partnership include making Screwfix's e-commerce website a hundred times faster and improving its ability to offer the fastest non-food delivery services worldwide.
Additionally, Kingfisher plans to create a new real-time ordering system that significantly improves inventory accuracy and applies Google Cloud AI tools using visual search to help customers find products that best meet their needs.
In his words, Thomas Kurian (CEO of Google Cloud) said: They are proud to partner with Kingfisher to optimize, accelerate and scale its efforts. They feel glad to work with global retail leaders like Kingfisher to help create even better in-store and e-commerce experiences. Customers are the key to the cloud in transforming retail business digitally.
Conclusively, Google Cloud and Kingfisher have already started working together and have a plan for the group's digital leadership position.
