Breuninger: Leveraging Google Cloud for Enhanced Customer Experience

Breuninger is a luxury department store founded in 1881 and is one of the most successful fashion and lifestyle businesses in Germany today. The company offers 1,000 brands across 11 stores, including flagships in Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, as well as its online storefront. Breuninger has 5,500 employees and provides 15 premium services such as personal shopping and a shuttle service. The company is known for its innovative corporate culture and was one of the first in the country to install elevators in its department stores in the 1950s and to introduce a customer loyalty card in 1959.

Breuninger, a luxury department store in Germany, was facing a challenge with its complex IT landscape. The company was fragmented into many departments, each with their own technology stack focusing on their own use cases. They had on-premises databases and other systems such as SAP, all gathering different types of data for different business units. This dispersed IT landscape made it difficult for the company to make the most of its data. Furthermore, the company's online storefront, which brought in a significant 30% of sales in 2018, presented exciting opportunities with data. However, to optimize the website and make the online customer experience smoother and more tailored to individual shoppers, Breuninger needed to get its data on track.

To solve its data challenges, Breuninger turned to Google Cloud. The company had three priorities: to accelerate its time to data insights through analytics solutions, to make the varying components of its complex IT landscape interact smoothly, and to gain flexibility with a storage solution that allows it to incorporate more sources of data as needed. Breuninger now uses Cloud Storage to provision, share, and archive the data generated across its varying systems. With BigQuery, the retailer jumpstarts data analysis by querying streaming data in real time, gaining a wider visibility over different parts of the business. To extract data from diverse data sources, and then transform and load this data into BigQuery, Breuninger uses an array of fully managed microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine. The company has also started testing Cloud Composer to orchestrate its full data pipeline spanning across cloud and on-premises data centers.

• With the help of Google Cloud, Breuninger was able to unite its complex IT landscape and make sense of data from a wide range of sources. This has freed time from infrastructure management, allowing teams to focus on discovering and sharing data insights across the organization. The company has also been able to integrate seamlessly with its complex IT landscape, making data and API integration easy and fast. Furthermore, the company has been able to expand its online store from Germany and Austria to also serve customers in Switzerland. With standardized solutions and the support of Google Cloud managed services, Breuninger’s Data Platform Solutions team now has more time to better support other departments across the organization with data insights.

• Accelerated time to insights with fully managed services that process data from varied sources on BigQuery

• Enabled better-informed decisions with data streaming and querying in real time on BigQuery

• Significant growth in online sales, with the online shop bringing in 30% of sales in 2018