Cool techs unknown inside story of Starbucks-alliance with Microsoft, transformation to embrace the cloud!

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Starbucks currently has more than 28, 000 stores in 77 countries, with more than 330000 employees wearing green aprons and serving an average of 100 million customers a week. How to use technology to simplify the work process, improve employee efficiency, and even add more intelligent technology applications to improve customer consumption experience has become a challenge for Starbucks Technology.

At this year's Build 2018 developer conference, invite Starbucks, which, like Microsoft, made its fortune in Seattle to share that they now embrace cloud and AI in their business. Starbucks announced an alliance with Microsoft to help the coffee chain store storefront, increase customer experience features, and create an ideal coffee experience.

To support its global expansion, Starbucks is actively transforming to embrace the cloud

In recent years, Starbucks has actively transformed itself into a digital technology company, not only embracing the cloud, but also combining emerging technologies such as IoT, AI and blockchain to create a more intelligent digital consumer experience.

Over the past 40 years, Starbucks has only focused on the following three core areas: employees (Partners), coffee and food (Products), and shopping (Stores). Starbucks is actively transforming itself into a digital technology company, using digital technology to expand its global business, not only continuing the IT transformation and actively embracing the cloud, but also combining emerging digital technologies such as IoT, AI and block chains. To create a more intelligent digital consumer experience. Until a few years ago, digital technology (Digital) jumped to become the fourth largest new area of concern for Starbucks.

Jeff Wile, senior vice president of Starbucks' global retail and cloud and core services, also revealed many unknown facts about Starbucks' use of digital technology, thus giving a glimpse of several important processes of Starbucks'IT development in the past.

To this end, he says, the company even hired Gerri Martin-Flickinger, a former Adobe chief information officer, to take the helm three years ago as the first technology chief to drive Starbucks's digital transformation. after she took office, she worked out a five-year technology strategy for the company, hoping that through the combination of business and technology, the Starbucks-style consistent consumer experience could spread to every corner of the world.

So, one of the important technologies is the cloud. He said that in order to support global expansion, the company went to the cloud as early as a few years ago to rapidly deploy their new services to the global market through the rapid deployment and dynamic scheduling of cloud services. so far, there are as many as 20 Starbucks applications, all of which are deployed by Microsoft Azure, while providing the use of services related to global stores in its seven cloud operations centers (region) around the world.

Starbucks has begun an active digital transformation in recent years, using digital technology to create new services and consumer experiences, including mobile applications, inventory management, scheduling optimization, data modeling, and supply chain management.

Starbucks Action App is also used to illustrate the importance of going up to the cloud. He mentioned that since the launch of the mobile App ordering service three years ago, more than 10% (12%) of orders have been placed through App in the United States alone. with the rapid rise in the number of global users, he said bluntly that the mobile infrastructure at the back end of the service must have the ability to automatically and flexibly expand to support the growing demand for service usage. "this can only be achieved in the cloud," he said. Through cloud technology, we can help them develop applications or services more quickly, so as to accelerate application innovation.

Starbucks is adding a virtual assistant function to Mobile App, which allows customers to order when they talk to their phones.

Shanghai Starbucks Coffee Roasters (Starbucks Reserve Roastery) began to offer augmented reality (AR) functions.

Image via Alibaba Group

Just scan the QR Code in the store with your mobile phone and you will be able to interact with the items in the store.

Not only adopting new technology, but also early in the product development process, Starbucks began to embrace DevOps, speeding up product development through continuous delivery and continuous integration, and even introducing Container technology to speed up application testing, deployment, and launch time.

An AR burial site can support up to 300 mobile phones to scan at the same time. The effective distance for mobile phones to identify AR burial sites is different from the physical size. For example, the identification distance of large copper cans is 3 meters, and the French kettle must be close to sweeping because of its small size, so the effective distance is 1 meter.

The AR platform also offers a digital menu that displays details such as coffee bars, brewing techniques, invoicing, and so on, which integrates live and online customer experiences.

She said that Starbucks not only began to step into action very early, but also constantly updated its services and added new features. For example, it now provides a digital order management tool (Digital Order Manager) on mobile apps, so that baristas standing in the bar can track and manage coffee orders placed by action on tablets. When the coffee is made, customers can receive notification from their mobile phone App to pick up coffee. There is no need to wait on the spot to pick up the meal.

Using big data and machine learning to optimize scheduling and automatically recalculate coffee orders, the Starbucks technology chief recently revealed more examples in a Q & A report on Microsoft's Transform website.

Starbucks production Controller tool (Starbucks Production Controller) is another example, which can be used to help store employees solve the problem of action orders and meal order, which is currently being tested in the store.

Take the optimization of order scheduling as an example. Jeff Wile said, for example, in the past, shop staff would make coffee according to the order, one cup was finished, and then the next cup was made, and customers waited in the store to get their own coffee in order. now, Starbucks is using big data, machine learning and AI to help shop assistants make coffee more efficiently, optimize the schedule through machine learning algorithms, and find out which orders should be made first. In order to improve the efficiency of work, for example, although the guest who ordered food in the car placed an order later than the previous group of guests, he only ordered a cup of coffee, so he could make it first without following the old "order first, do it first" principle. With a faster serving speed, baristas have enough time to handle large action orders.

In addition to optimizing order scheduling, Starbucks recently developed its own progressive web application (Progressive Web App) to replace the existing Windows App, so that the web can also have a native App experience, customers can use the phone to open the web page to order, pay or get rewards, which will be more convenient to use.

Starbucks also introduced the new app at this year's Build conference.

Not only using digital technology to improve external services, Starbucks also starts from simplifying internal processes, reducing the labor work of shop assistants, so that they can focus on serving every customer.

In inventory management, it is now possible to automatically advise the store to buy coffee beans or other goods every day based on the coffee and meal ordering and sales data of each store, so that the store manager can focus on other more valuable work.

It turns out that Starbucks is a technology company delayed by coffee.

Reference: iThome,google,2018 build