Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBY) announced today that it has expanded its relationship with Google Cloud through a multi-year collaboration that will accelerate its omni-always transformation, enabling the Company to better serve customers in a digital-first environment as it rebuilds authority in the Home, Baby, Beauty and Wellness markets. To perform this work, Deloitte will serve as strategic transformation services partner.
The Company has committed to a five-year agreement with Google Cloud to deploy a range of platform solutions to further personalize the shopping experience for customers, enhance fulfilment capacity, and optimize 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.
Bed Bath & Beyond’s President and CEO, Mark Tritton said, “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, personalized shopping experience for our customers.”
Chief Operating Officer and President of buybuy BABY, John Hartmann said, “The end-to-end modernization 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.”
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 the following core areas:
- Data-driven, customer-centric decision-making: Bed Bath & Beyond will utilize 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 optimized inventory and merchandise planning.
- Delivering a seamless, omni-always customer experience: Google Cloud will also help Bed Bath & Beyond meet the needs of its customers by creating a truly personalized, 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.
- Optimizing fulfillment strategy: Bed Bath & Beyond will be able to leverage Google Cloud’s technology to harness its data and drive smart allocation to enhance management of fulfillment and cost. The partnership provides enhanced fulfillment capabilities at a massive scale to optimize virtually every aspect of the business, from demand forecasting to supply chain logistics and the customer experience.
“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,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “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.”
“Bed Bath and Beyond has a long history of being customer oriented. This technology will provide its customers with new accessible digital platforms and channels,” said Christina Bieniek, Chief Commercial Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “This transformation will provide the business with a new level of agility that will allow it to respond quickly to customer demands and market conditions.”
