Hi, I'm Stephanie and today we're going to look at how you can build a real-time inventory management system using Google Cloud Spanner. Consumers are more digitally connected than ever before. Expectations for omnichannel shopping experiences across online and offline channels have increased. Experiences like buy online, pick up in store are expected now rather than considered a convenience. For a company like Maxim Modish, a fictional retailer, In-person shopping has been the backbone of their retail model for years.
As a premier retailer, they have hundreds of department stores across the nation. But to meet increasing online demands, they've had to undergo a digital transformation. In recent years, Max and Modish customers have been engaging with them through multiple channels. Online, through social media, in-store, and in-app.
Naturally, these customers expect a seamless experience across all of these channels. To better meet these expectations, Max and Manish needed a complete picture of their inventory flow and real-time decision-making at scale. This revealed three key challenges they faced with their technology stack. 1. Inconsistent view of data across silos.
For example, a women's dress would show in stock on the mobile shopping app, but the same dress showed out of stock in the physical store. Additionally, running their existing on-premise infrastructure led to numerous cost inefficiencies. To keep up with the growing volume of data and meet seasonal scaling during times like Black Friday, they had to increase their on-prem data center for peak capacity. which aggravated operational costs and tied up resources managing that infrastructure.
Last, they were unable to evolve with new business needs. Running antiquated systems, it was difficult to adapt or modernize their applications. Applying changes to monolithic systems is a long, arduous process. This is where Google Cloud helped turn things around. Through their partnership, Max Amadish was able to build an inventory ledger solution with Google Cloud Spinner at its core.
This inventory ledger solution is modeled based on retail environments represented as a series of events. These events include things like items shipped to a store, item price updates, or customer purchase requests. They chose Spanner to house their inventory event ledger, which would keep track of the constant changes to inventory.
Cloud Spanner is a managed database with strong consistency in regional and multi-regional setup, no downtime, and scale insurance. It combines the best of relational semantics and scale. In addition, Spanner is a managed service, which frees Max and Matash from operational overhead of their own large-scale inventory systems. Whenever an inventory event happens, it's placed in an append-only immutable event ledger.
This guarantees inventory changes are recorded in the system consistently across multiple regions. As customers buy items across different channels, in-store or mobile, Spanner gives them a consistent view of inventory no matter what region or channel the shopper comes from. All replicas of the inventory ledger are kept up to date, in sync, and quickly available. What's more, data housed in Spanner is easily available to other Google Cloud services, making it simple for Maxim Modish to leverage capabilities like BigQuery for SQL-based analytics, Looker for modeling and reporting, and AutoML and BigQuery ML to apply machine learning for smarter real-time decision making.
For example, Maxim Modish is able to integrate BigQuery to create this Looker dashboard. They can conduct further analysis using BigQuery as a managed data warehouse and Looker for interactive visualizations across all stores. By implementing this inventory ledger solution with Cloud Spanner, Max and Monash now has real-time view of inventory across hundreds of data sources and applications, the ability to scale up and down to support peak traffic during large shopping events, managed services which significantly decreases burdens of operations, and the ability to modernize and adapt to new business needs through an ecosystem of integrated cloud services.
By leveraging just some of the powerful features of Google Cloud, Maxim Modish is now able to do real-time decision-making for omnichannel retail and build a seamless online and offline shopping experience for thousands of happy customers using a single source of truth. Check out the link here to learn more about Spanner.