“No more checking things twice!”
– Chief Elf Manager, Santa HQ
90%
improvement in elf satisfaction
30%
increase in sleigh take-off time
75%
nice rating identified using Looker
It’s an age-old question, how does Father Christmas deliver millions of presents to households every year, across the world, in just one night? Moving away from tired manual processes, Father Christmas and his whole operation can now proudly say they bring the joy of Christmas to children all over the world with the magic of Google Cloud.
Each year, the team at Santa HQ needs to figure out which children around the world have been naughty and nice. This means many elf hours are spent manually sifting through letters to determine behavioural classification. The growing population means there are more letters each year making it hard to keep up, and Christmas lists and letters need to be kept safe and secure at all times – GDPR of course applies to Santa HQ as a Data Controller!
Together, CTS and Google Cloud can help Father Christmas and his team plan the perfect Christmas, making sure children everywhere get the right gifts at the right time. Our secure and scalable data platform on BigQuery cross references data points such as children’s request letters (thanks Cloud Vision API!), parent sentiment analysis and top secret elf insights; VertexAI machine learning models then classify the children based on those incoming data points, and finally Looker allows the team to visualise everything in one simple dashboard to help organise who is getting what.
This results in;
Christmas is about bringing everyone together and a lack of collaboration at Santa HQ doesn’t set a very good precedent for spreading that all important Christmas cheer. To avoid chaos in the grotto, whether that’s missing toy parts, reindeer roll call or digitising manual processes, Google Workspace can help. Let’s take a look at some examples of how Santa’s workshop is becoming a shining example of elf-iciency!
Making toys for millions of children can lead to the odd piece going missing, or things breaking in production. Previously, dealing with this has been slow and inefficient with elves having to go between departments looking for missing pieces – as they say in the North Pole, “it’s like trying to find a teddy’s arm in a toy workshop!” This led to elves falling behind quota, incomplete toys and most importantly, disappointed children. Now, with the use of Appsheet, an alert is sent across the Workshop to hunt down that missing piece quickly.
When it comes to preparing the sleigh, manual processes left elves walking the shop floor with reams of paper checklists. This is no good for unorganised elves, or the environment. Once or twice, the reindeer checklist had been mixed up with the external comms list, causing a GDPR breach! Elves can now count reindeer on the register in Appsheet, solving the issue of mixing up lists while also saving on paper wastage. With an insight report on how many presents are loaded, route options and who is fronting up the sleigh – sorry Rudolph, it’s you again – Santa is ready to set off in keeping with schedule with no delays.
While our Christmas elves are a jolly bunch, they’ve previously not been the best at collaborating between departments with the elves in HQ and the workshop using different collaboration tools. This has resulted in shadow IT with WhatsElf being used by the workshop elves to organise shifts. Not to mention fostering an “us and them” culture between Elves in HQ and on the frontline, causing squabbles. But, by rolling out Google Workspace across the business, no elf is left on the shelf any more, resulting in great efficiency and elf-esteem.
Together, CTS and all the elves at Santa’s workshop have worked hard at driving a culture of collaboration. In doing so, our merry elves have seen benefits such as;
When asked about his experience working with CTS, Father Christmas of Santa HQ explains, “When we first started to work with CTS, I was ho ho hoping to see some improvements but what I have seen is real magic thanks to Google Cloud! I can now get out of the workshop and into the air faster thanks to more efficient processes, which means home in time for a mulled wine and (another) mince pie with Mrs. Claus.”
“No more checking things twice!”
– Chief Elf Manager, Santa HQ