Autogrill: Serving up fresh sales figures to help store staff react faster to trends

Travelers relaxing with a coffee at the airport or taking a break at a motorway service station might not know it, but it’s likely they bought their snack from a concession run by Autogrill. With 4,000 points of sale worldwide in 1,000 locations, the company operates the concessions of well-known brands such as Starbucks and KFC, as well as its own brands. In Europe alone, Autogrill is present in 21 airports, 490 service areas, 151 railway stations, and 75 commercial centers.

Before, travelers may have been happy with a quick bite, but many are now looking for more from their experience. They might want a comfortable space to check their emails, or a locally inspired menu. "Our customers' expectations have grown," confirms Daniele Rizzo, Chief Information Officer for Italy and Europe at Autogrill. "At the same time, there’s increasing competition in the sector, so we want to make sure we're offering the best experience possible."

For an enjoyable time spent in Autogrill-run concessions, stores need to provide a good balance of efficient service, quality products, and a warm welcome for business and holiday travelers alike. With around 400,000 transactions and up to 1 million receipt lines a day in Italy alone, keeping track of how well individual concessions are serving their customers can be a challenge.

Inspired by the digital pedometer that provided a running tally of the amount of steps he had taken that day, Daniele decided to create a way for store managers to monitor in-store sales much more closely, and react faster to sales trends. His solution? An app that offers up-to-date information on sales and productivity in relation to budget projections. To provide the data warehousing and analytics power it requires, he turned to Google Cloud.

"We’re increasingly looking to consolidate providers and industrialize our backend functions, so we can develop effective business processing and focus more on improving customer service," says Daniele of the company’s IT strategy. "We chose Google Cloud as a partner that can help us to achieve this, now and in the future."

Building MyStore Sales to provide easy data access

Tailoring a store's promotions to reflect changing demand or make the most of celebration days can help boost revenue while enhancing the customer experience. Autogrill's in-store offers are looked after by its store managers, who oversee concessions and are responsible for implementing marketing offers and distributing staff effectively. Previously, store managers received sales updates on a daily basis, but with a day’s delay, making it difficult to react quickly to changes in consumer behavior and trial new promotions effectively.

"As part of our broader digital transformation project to move to the cloud, we migrated our supply-chain ordering systems in order to shorten logistics times, as we were moving towards using more packaged products," says Daniele. "I realized we could use the same infrastructure to provide real-time information about the transactions happening in our stores. This would enable real-time productivity control, so managers could intervene promptly."

Working with implementation partner Noovle, Autogrill built MyStore Sales, an app available on iOS and Android. It integrates information from Autogrill's SAP financial and HR software, as well as its cash register logs, to provide real-time insights into cumulative sales in a particular store. It also updates the number of employee hours required to achieve those sales every half hour, as an indicator of productivity.

"We built a very simple interface, and it was adopted immediately," says Daniele. "Store managers really like being able to compare actual sales to the projected budget in real time by simply opening up an app on their smartphone. Now, it's also used by sales directors and the CEO himself."

Using BigQuery for real-time data analysis

Having begun its digital transformation in 2012, Autogrill was already using Google solutions when it launched MyStore Sales in 2015, including Google Workspace as its productivity software. “Personally, I’m a big Google enthusiast, but the decisive factor was that we felt Google Cloud offered a cutting-edge cloud platform that could help us with its great quality products," says Daniele. Autogrill had also been working with Noovle since 2009, when it helped to implement Google Custom Search Engine for the Autogrill website.

To run MyStore Sales and its other logistics applications, Autogrill needs to process large volumes of data, while maintaining a high level of control to ensure this data is consolidated correctly and that nothing is missing.

To achieve this, financial and HR data is fed from Autogrill's main centralized on-premises database. It’s stored using Cloud SQL and Datastore, then analyzed using BigQuery. "There are many advantages to using BigQuery," says Daniele. "As there are no licensing costs and it offers a pay-per-use approach, we can ensure our computing requirements are cost-effective. And thanks to the high level of scalability, we don't need to plan for provisioning."

The app is powered by App Engine, using Cloud Storage, and Cloud Endpoints to build and manage versions on iOS and Android. "The back end of the app works very well, meaning we’re able to concentrate on the value-add aspects of MyStore Sales," says Daniele. "That's one of the advantages of Google Cloud, we’re able to trust it to handle the infrastructure and concentrate on our part of the job."

Reacting faster and achieving higher net sales

Today, MyStore Sales is considered a critical app for Autogrill. After launching in Italy in 2015, it’s now used in 2,000 stores in France, Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland. "If the app stopped working for five minutes, I would immediately receive a phone call. It's that important to our managers," says Daniele. "We've seen a positive correlation between users who access the app more than five times a day, and higher net sales. Frequent users are also more reactive, and they perform on average 4% better than the bottom 25% of users. With so many points of sale, even small gains in performance add up to a significant improvement overall."

Using the app, store managers are better able to distribute staff effectively between stores and plan for peak staffing times. They’re also trialing promotions in the morning to see if they should be rolled out in other stores. "As a result of the real-time insights offered by MyStore Sales on Google Cloud, we're more reactive as a business," says Daniele. "We can track how commercial initiatives are impacting the customer and experiment more with offers such as instant reward campaigns. We couldn’t do that in the past."

Autogrill, with the help of Noovle, is continuing to improve the app to provide new functionality. It’s looking to integrate information about the profitability of individual products, and use AutoML and BigQuery ML to analyze historical data and generate sales predictions. It’s also interested in integrating customer feedback available using the Places APIs on Google Maps Platform, which will give managers a qualitative insight into customer satisfaction, on top of financial indicators.

"MyStore Sales on Google Cloud has set a standard for the rest of our data warehousing and reporting," says Daniele. "We’re looking forward to rolling it out to more European countries soon, and we’re excited to continue transforming our infrastructure with Google Cloud."