How Standard Industries uses Google Cloud to power homes of the future

Today, about 5 million U.S. homes are re-roofed each year, but only a fraction of those homeowners opt for solar panels. I’ve spoken in the past about how Google Cloud technologies are helping businesses bring solar energy to more customers. Another great organization that aims to close this gap by making solar installation easy for homeowners is Standard Industries. Founded in 1886, Standard Industries is a global holding company focused on building materials. With more than 15,000 employees, operations in over 80 countries, and 180+ manufacturing plants worldwide, Standard’s businesses—including BMI, GAF, GAF Energy, Schiedel, SGI, and Siplast—range from the world’s largest roofing and waterproofing company to aggregates, insulation and industry changing solar solutions, as well as real estate and investment platforms. Given the variety and complexity of these operations, Standard Industries saw an opportunity to streamline operations by moving to the cloud.Replicating its infrastructure to Google Cloud, Standard Industries is able to aggregate manufacturing, supply chain, and sales information into one central place—and make the data available directly within the tools employees already use daily, such as Google Sheets. With Google Cloud AI solutions like Cloud AutoML, Standard Industries is also aiming to become more predictive, building machine learning models to forecast customer demand, shipping needs, and commodity pricing. By automating analytics, data scientists are freed up to focus on advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence work, and engineers spend more time doing their core jobs—writing code—instead of manually managing data. To help protect information across its six operating companies and two related investment businesses, Standard Industries also relies on Google Cloud’s security and identity and access management solutions. By replacing homegrown tools with Google Cloud’s security products, Standard Industries now centrally manages user accounts and policies with ease. “Google Cloud makes it easy to do good things, which matches our approach to renewable energy,” said Rich Robinson, CTO at Standard Industries. “The best time to get started with solar is when you’re already installing a new roof. As the world’s largest roofing company, we believe we’re in a unique position to eliminate barriers to solar adoption with our ‘roof as a service’ model. We want to make renewable energy effortless for homeowners, just as Google Cloud is simplifying technology for us.”Standard Industries has already achieved efficiencies by choosing Google Cloud as its cloud platform of choice. In addition to making more decisions backed by data, employees in some functions have seen productivity gains of up to 25%, reclaiming valuable time as a result of unifying its global workforce with Google Cloud productivity and collaboration tools. But this is just the beginning: The company has started using predictive analytics for more precise manufacturing forecasting and to personalize experiences for its customer base of contractors and homeowners.Google Cloud’s continued work with Standard Industries reflects our shared vision to build a more sustainable future. We’re honored that Standard Industries has chosen us as their technology partner as they advance their goal to generate solar energy from every roof.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform