By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the largest retailers in Southern Africa, Pepkor Group, has entered into an agreement with Google Cloud to allow its subsidiary, Pepkor IT, to transform its in-house logistical processes, enabling it to help more households across Africa access value-for-money products.
Pepkor IT processes generate massive volumes of data every day as a result of its consumer base of more than 28 million in-store customers and a footprint of 5,400 retail stores.
For a retailer that operates at such a scale, a deep understanding of the data Pepkor IT generates is critical for it to deliver great experiences for shoppers.
It was because of this necessity that both parties agreed to work together as Pepkor IT will leverage Google Cloud’s data analytics solutions to place the right product in front of the right customer at the right time.
Working with solutions such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, and Data Studio, Pepkor IT is now empowered with the innovative tools it needs to make smart, transformative business decisions every day.
Pepkor IT has deployed Google Workspace to digitize its manual processes related to work requests coming in from the stores, which used to take up to 15 days.
Pepkor implemented a digital system that uses Google Forms, Sheets, Gmail, and Google App Script, and was able to provide real-time visibility on the approval status for these requests.
The new system has reduced the process flow from 15 days to 3 days and has also generated quicker application responses, enabling the stores to operate faster and more efficiently.
To date, a total of 10,682 requests have been logged using the new process, the process flow is 50 per cent to 70 per cent faster, depending on the labour request type.
“Pepkor IT is using Google Cloud to enrich lives through innovation. Our Big Data landscape consists of a much broader and deeper set of data than ever before.
“We process huge volumes of data at the speed of light. The environment enables our business partners to do any type of analytics so that they can make better and faster decisions,” the Chief Information Officer for Pepkor IT, Gabrie Gouws, said.
The Director of Google Cloud Africa, Niral Patel, while also commenting, stated that, “Pepkor has a deep-rooted legacy in Southern Africa, which has made it a household name. It is therefore not surprising that Pepkor is striving to take its shoppers’ experiences to the next level.
With Pepkor running its data workloads on Google Cloud’s innovative data analytics solutions, stores are being stocked quicker, deliveries are going out on time, and shoppers are buying a product at a much more affordable price.
“Our collaboration with Pepkor is a great example of the power of data to make businesses more efficient, ultimately improving the customer experience.”
