Autogrill: Leveraging IoT for Real-Time Sales Data Analysis and Enhanced Customer Experience

Autogrill is a leading provider of food and beverage services for travelers. The company operates in 31 countries with over 60,000 employees and has an annual turnover of €5 billion. Autogrill operates 4,000 points of sale worldwide in 1,000 locations, including 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. The company is committed to providing a good balance of efficient service, quality products, and a warm welcome for business and holiday travelers alike.

Autogrill, a leading provider of food and beverage services for travelers, operates in 31 countries with over 60,000 employees and an annual turnover of €5 billion. The company operates 4,000 points of sale worldwide in 1,000 locations, including concessions of well-known brands such as Starbucks and KFC. With around 400,000 transactions and up to 1 million receipt lines a day in Italy alone, tracking the performance of individual concessions was a significant challenge. The company needed a solution to monitor in-store sales more closely and react faster to sales trends. The existing system provided 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.

Autogrill, in collaboration with Noovle, developed MyStore Sales, an app available on iOS and Android. The app 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. The app uses Google Cloud's BigQuery for real-time data analysis, Cloud SQL and Datastore for data storage, and App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Endpoints for app management. The app allows store managers to distribute staff effectively between stores, plan for peak staffing times, and trial promotions in real-time. Autogrill is also planning to integrate information about the profitability of individual products and use AutoML and BigQuery ML to analyze historical data and generate sales predictions.

• The implementation of MyStore Sales app has significantly improved Autogrill's operational efficiency. The app provides real-time insights to store managers, improving resource management and helping them react faster to changes in store. This has enabled the company to be more reactive as a business, track how commercial initiatives are impacting the customer, and experiment more with offers such as instant reward campaigns. The app has also helped store managers to distribute staff effectively between stores and plan for peak staffing times. Furthermore, the app has become a critical tool for Autogrill, with its importance being highlighted by the fact that if the app stopped working for even five minutes, the management would immediately receive a phone call.

• Provides real-time data analysis capabilities for up to 1 million receipt lines a day with BigQuery

• Simplifies the management of backend infrastructure, enabling Autogrill to focus on achieving service and business goals

• App boosts in-store sales, digitizes 50% of sales data