7-Eleven Japan creates convenient data access with Google Cloud

The world’s largest convenience retailer is advancing digital transformation in Japan with a new data analysis platform built on Google Cloud.

7-Eleven Japan is consolidating and analyzing data from its 21,000 stores across the country using its new Google Cloud-based Seven Central platform. The retailer seeks to drive faster enterprise decision-making with real-time data views.

The platform brings siloed POS data from 7-Eleven Japan stores nationwide into one centralized location in the cloud, and then leverages Google Cloud’s smart data analytics solutions like BigQuery to analyze data at petabyte scale. In addition, Seven Central obtains a single unified application programming interface (API) for all of its data cloud with Google Cloud Apigee API management solution. 

By leveraging these technologies, 7-Eleven Japan can scale its Seven Central platform more efficiently and provide teams across the organization access to data and insights that were previously not accessible. Ultimately, the retailer intends to reduce time-to-insight, with a measurable impact on business operations.

In the first phase of rollout, 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.

"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.

“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, VP, Google Cloud Japan.

Based in Irving, Texas, 7 Eleven operates, franchises and/or licenses more than 71,100 stores in 17 countries.