Seven-Eleven Japan is advancing its digital transformation strategy with Seven Central, its data cloud platform built on Google Cloud that consolidates and analyzes data from its 21,000 stores across the country to drive real-time business decision making.

Marketing Technology News: Vericast Survey: How Deals Play a Role in Return to Pre-Pandemic Activities

At its core, Seven Central’s purpose is to enable real-time data views to enable faster business decision making. It brings siloed point of sale (POS) data from Seven-Eleven Japan stores nationwide onto one centralized location in the cloud, and uses Google Cloud’s smart data analytics solutions like BigQuery to analyze data at petabyte scale and API management platform, Apigee, which provides a single unified API for all of its data cloud. By leveraging these technologies, Seven Central can scale their platform more efficiently and give their teams across the organization access to data and insights that were previously not accessible, which dramatically reduces time-to-insight that has a measurable impact to business operations.

“With Seven Central, each division in Seven-Eleven Japan can gain a real-time snapshot of any store’s data and business performance and respond accordingly. In choosing to build our data cloud on Google Cloud, we prioritized service scalability, security, and openness to build an agile development system that can serve the needs of the organization well into the future,” said Izuru Nishimura, Executive Officer and Head of ICT Department, Seven-Eleven Japan.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With George Donovan, Chief Revenue Officer at Allego

In the first phase, Seven-Eleven Japan collected POS data from its existing network of 21,000 stores to enable real-time analysis. With both the volume of data and the regularity with which it is accessed likely to steadily increase in time, Seven-Eleven Japan designed Seven Central to be able to scale to up to 30,000 stores in the future. This ensures the platform can support the company’s future IT strategies and digital transformation initiatives.

“Seven Central is a great example of how a robust data cloud strategy can drive significant business impact. Exploring Google Cloud AI and machine learning technologies in the future will further accelerate Seven-Eleven Japan’s data-led innovation and enable them to take on challenges in new areas,” said Tomoyuki Hirate, Vice President, Google Cloud Japan.