Applying Advanced Analytics across the Manufacturing value chain to create Exponential Value

How Systech empowered a leading automotive manufacturer to gain market share and foster sustainable competitive advantage 

Who we worked with:

An American multinational automotive manufacturer and clean energy company 

What the company got: 

• A centralized data management infrastructure and business layer 
• The infrastructure to explore and mine data for deeper understanding of performance, risks, and bottom-line considerations 
• Prescriptive analytics to proactively drive growth strategies and deliver tangible results 

THE BUSINESS CONTEXT 

Automotive manufacturing is a competitive space and presented an opportunity to our customer to differentiate and stand out from the crowd. One area that had the opportunity to deliver significant competitive edge was analytics. 

THE CHALLENGE 

Automotive manufacturing was a competitive space and required timely, insightful, and understandable information. Our customer was looking for a sustainable solution moving away from spreadsheets and manual collection of data. They needed to become a data-driven organization fast and address their top challenges: 

• Ability to effectively analyze customer needs 
• Analyzing sales and marketing activity 
• Ad-hoc analysis of service center problems 

 After researching a few potential BI implementation providers, customer finalized Systech as the perfect fit for their requirements.  

THE SOLUTION 

Granular view into business operations and insights 

To grow as a company and fulfill its purpose as a top automotive producer and clean energy company, the most important factor is manufacturing efficiency and customer satisfaction. What our customer needed was a means to establish a strong customer relationship by knowing the needs and behavior of its customers and tweak their production according to the customer demand. For this, Systech’s focus lied in implementing an effective BI solution which enabled their stakeholders to access marketing, sales, manufacturing, inventory, and customer data from different data sources, transform that data into meaningful and actionable insights. Systech built a centralized data management infrastructure and business layer to help customer gain a holistic view of their business operations across all business functions including marketing, sales, manufacturing, service, and executive partnerships segments.  

A modernized data infrastructure able to continuously monitor bottom line impact and make data driven decisions: 

 Marketing dashboard to deep dive into customer behavior and engagement 

Systech built a granular marketing dashboard to help business users in sales and store management to better service the needs of their customers. This was to help: 

• Identify wealthy counties in terms of luxury car markets, and reveal opportunities based on competitor market share penetration 
• Measure demand generation of various stores, while the real estate teams used these views to identify cities for new store locations.  
• Identify potential sales and service location opportunities across the United States by marrying competitor registration details with in-house data.  

 Production planning dashboards to gain insight into production delays 

To gain a deep understanding of production planning and execute impactful decisions based on factory resources and output, Systech built production planning dashboards. This was to help achieve: 

• High-level visibility into factory performance in terms of number of cars produced, variance between plan and actual, types of cars produced, and correlation of various configurations chosen by customer 
• Alert mechanism to identify any potential issues on the factory floor 
• Ability to assess equipment and worker utilization – as well as shrinkage and historical performance of the manufacturing and factory resources 

Operational dashboard to deliver streamlined operational planning  

To help the material resource planning (MRP) team monitor and analyze the weekly operation plan in real time and gauge issues happening at various stages, Systech simplified data analysis and distribution. These operational dashboards were to help: 

• Track near real-time manufacturing issues happening on the factory floor. 
• Monitor ongoing trends in production issues and identify potential causes for quality defects in specific parts. 
• Better evaluate issues resulting in a drop in the number of cars produced. 

Sales funnel analysis for driving growth and actionable insights  

The sales teams needed to find a systematic way to track weekly sales performance and customer drop-off by visualizing the sales funnel by stage: leads, test drives, orders, and cancellations. To cater to this need, Systech built sales funnel analysis to help: 

• Spot unusual trends and understand “what happened” when sales performance declined, or prospects dropped off.  
• Track lead generation and convert success rates for retail and service locations with retail store dashboard. 
• Optimize shift schedules to anticipate demand with workforce analysis. 
• Achieve goal setting and forecasting. 

Service performance dashboards to deliver customer value 

The stakeholders of service operations management were looking for a way to a build a productive collaboration between executive staff and engineering team and increase the turnaround of identifying and fixing repeated issues and concerns.  

 To cater to these needs Systech built service dashboards to provide a complete view of all service centers and their performance by tracking 70 % of KPIs for their service teams. This was to help: 

• Monitor the cases where same day service % was low. 
• Drill down and identify the cause(s) of poor performance and isolate if they were inventory or workforce issues.  
• View the total number of repair orders created, same day services, and same day service percentage. 
• Track demand metrics like webpage views, reservations, and customer satisfaction metrics. 
• Navigate gross orders, cancelled orders, net orders, service repairs, same-day service turnrounds, manufactured cars, planned cars, and deliver cars data with ease. 

All the dashboards could be easily extracted into email newsletters and insights and shared weekly to the teams. They were customizable and could be tailored to the needs of individual departments.

Systech was successful in accomplishing their data and analytics initiatives 2x faster at 2x lower cost than most providers in a matter of months. 

THE BUSINESS IMPACT 

Systech successfully achieved a smarter and connected environment with holistic view of business to transform decision making. It helped: 

• Generate more impactful campaigns and initiatives to foster increased sales revenue and facilitate greater customer loyalty and satisfaction through the employment of these dashboards.  
• Forecasting inventory so that they could better meet the demands of their popular automotive vehicles based on aesthetic variations.  
• Ensured on-time delivery maximize profit and minimize risks. 
• Improved store efficiencies to boost sales. 
• Enhanced customer experience, delivery, production, and service center effectiveness.