Google Cloud is helping 7-Eleven in Japan with a data cloud platform that consolidates and analyses data from 21,000 stores across the country to drive real-time business decision making.

At its core is Seven Central, where the data are analysed in real time to enable faster business decision making. It brings siloed point of sale (PoS) data from 7-Eleven stores nationwide onto one centralised location in the cloud, and uses Google Cloud’s smart data analytics such as BigQuery to analyse data at petabyte scale and API management platform Apigee, which provides a single unified API for all its data cloud.

By leveraging these technologies, Seven Central can scale its platform more efficiently and give its teams across the organisation access to data and insights that were previously not accessible, which reduces time-to-insight and impacts business operations.

“With Seven Central, each division in 7-Eleven Japan can gain a real-time snapshot of any store’s data and business performance and respond accordingly,” said Izuru Nishimura, executive officer at 7-Eleven Japan. “In choosing to build our data cloud on Google Cloud, we prioritised service scalability, security and openness to build an agile development system that can serve the needs of the organisation well into the future.”

In the first phase, 7-Eleven collected PoS data from its network of 21,000 stores to enable real-time analysis. With both the volume of data and the regularity with which they are accessed likely to increase steadily in time, 7-Eleven 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,” said Tomoyuki Hirate, vice president for Google Cloud in Japan. “Exploring Google Cloud AI and machine-learning technologies in the future will further accelerate 7-Eleven Japan’s data-led innovation and enable them to take on challenges in new areas.”

As an operating company of the Seven & i Group, 7-Eleven Japan runs Japan’s largest chain of convenience stores with 20,980 stores nationwide. It was quick to introduce PoS cash registers, was the first to implement 24-hour opening, and has proactively rolled out its own private brand – Seven Premium. The company has 8959 employees.