With over 90,000 employees in Switzerland and abroad, the Coop Group generates annual sales of around 30 billion Swiss francs. More than 2300 Coop supermarkets and various specialist shop chains are the most important pillar, but international wholesale and production companies also provide important sources of income.
The over 150 year old cooperative with over 2.5 million members resp. customers want to do pioneering work for the retail industry of the future. The combination of brick-and-mortar and online retail plays a crucial role. A flexible, scalable and efficient IT infrastructure is a prerequisite for the success of this cross-channel strategy.
As a big player in Swiss retail, business areas such as marketing and sales of the Coop Group are very familiar with Google products such as Google Ads and Google Maps. These departments have also recognized the great potential of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in particular GCP products for data analytics such as Dataflow and BigQuery. To benefit from GCP, Coop addresses challenges such as:
Michel Rodel
IT Systems Technology, Head of Unix Solutions
Wabion has has guided Coop through a so-called Cloud Foundation, which serves as the basis for the targeted implementation of the Coop cloud strategy. As a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner in German-speaking countries, Wabion has tailored Google Best Practices for the DACH region. The following illustration positions the Cloud Foundation in the so-called “Cloud Enterprise Stack” with its 3 levels and four pillars:
Ultimately, the goal of a Cloud Foundation is to set up a GCP organization in accordance with company-specific guidelines, structures etc., on which GCP products in the technology stack (Compute Engine, BigQuery etc.) and the provided applications are based.
Governance, Security, Accelerators (tools) and Training run through all levels of the Cloud Enterprise Stack and all stages on the way to the Cloud Foundation:
In several workshops, the Google Cloud experts from Wabion worked with the stakeholders at Coop to develop the concepts for the different elements of the Cloud Foundation:
The concepts developed with Wabion enabled Coop to tackle the configurations of the company-specific GCP instance. Supported by Wabion, the Coop specialists became familiar with the Google Cloud Console and developed the integration of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). As a result, Coop developers can build containerized applications on a hybrid platform. Various Coop teams were quick to use GCP for their first productive projects (e.g. in the area of data analytics, see figure above) and benefited from neatly set up Coop GCP organization.
At the end of the Cloud Foundation implementation, the experienced Wabion experts automated the GCP configuration of the Coop organization using Terraform. This easy-to-reproduce setup sets the course for an efficient implementation of the planned projects on GCP.
With the successfully implemented Cloud Foundation, the GCP experts from Wabion have created the conditions for Coop to accelerate the journey into Google Cloud:
Coop speeds up its journey to the cloud – and can draw on Wabion’s expertise at any time if necessary. With a focus on the flexibility, scalability and efficiency of Google Cloud, Coop also sets the standard for Swiss Retail in IT.