Bed Bath & Beyond expands Google Cloud partnership

• September 21, 2020

The company has committed to a five-year agreement with Google Cloud to deploy a range of platform solutions to further personalise the shopping experience for customers, enhance fulfilment capacity, and optimise merchandise planning and demand forecasting. Bed Bath & Beyond will leverage a number of Google Cloud technologies, including BigQuery, Spanner, Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, to establish a singular view of customer data across its portfolio of brands, according to a press release by Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Bed Bath & Beyond initially partnered with Google Cloud in 2017, leveraging their BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) white glove service to accommodate the surge in traffic during these moments and ensure revenue-critical systems were up-and-running. After pivoting rapidly to meet the sharp rise in digital demand throughout the COVID-19 period, Bed Bath & Beyond is expanding its partnership with Google, with support from Deloitte, to focus on and enhance some core areas.

Bed Bath & Beyond will utilise BigQuery to grow its machine learning and analytics capabilities. The company will operate these new capabilities to garner unique insights and expertise in its core markets to enhance the company’s ability to project future sales trends and, based on those projections, to make instant, customer-centric decisions with real-time data, better serving the market with improved demand prediction and optimised inventory and merchandise planning.

Google Cloud will also help Bed Bath & Beyond meet the needs of its customers by creating a truly personalised, omni-always shopping experience with a more agile and predictive e-commerce platform. The company will also be able to use Google Cloud’s AI-powered solutions to support the customers’ entire shopping experience, from search navigation and checkout to delivery or pickup.

Bed Bath & Beyond will be able to leverage Google Cloud’s technology to harness its data and drive smart allocation to enhance management of fulfilment and cost. The partnership provides enhanced fulfilment capabilities at a massive scale to optimise virtually every aspect of the business, from demand forecasting to supply chain logistics and the customer experience.

“From day one, Google Cloud has leaned in, showing true partnership and a desire to help us grow, be more efficient and effective as a business. I welcome the opportunity to expand our relationship, supported by Deloitte, creating a unique combination of expertise and authority to deliver a truly omni-always, personalised shopping experience for our customers,” Bed Bath & Beyond’s president and CEO, Mark Tritton said.

“The end-to-end modernisation of our technology infrastructure is driving substantial digital growth and strong customer adoption of new services like Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPIS) and Curbside Pickup. We’re delighted to partner with Google Cloud and Deloitte, to accelerate our efforts to build our business. By combining our unique data and insights in the home, baby, beauty, and wellness markets with the exceptional platform capabilities and expertise that Google and Deloitte provide, we will deliver a more agile, responsive, and customer-inspired shopping experience, making it even easier to feel at home with Bed Bath & Beyond,” chief operating officer and president of Buybuy Baby, John Hartmann said.

“Retailers are sitting on an incredible amount of data today, but this data is often siloed and lacks real-time processing. And high-traffic events like Cyber Monday or the COVID-19 pandemic only put more stress on systems. By migrating to Google Cloud, Bed Bath & Beyond expects to be able to reduce cost and drive business value through real-time analytics across marketing, merchandising, supply chain and more,” Carrie Tharp, VP of retail & consumer at Google Cloud said.