The client
The vehicle manufacturing industry is fiercely competitive. It’s a market that requires intelligence and insights to align sales and vehicle investment to match market and demand. The client wanted to transform how it leveraged its data and insights to drive its competitive stance and long-term growth by automating its marketing intelligence reporting. The goal was to alleviate the ongoing reporting burden, to ensure accuracy and to extract the full value within its data. The client asked Decision Inc. to develop a solution that would meet these requirements, resolve legacy issues and give them far greater insights into strategic business decisions.
Peter Gardner, Engagement Manager at Decision Inc.
“Every vehicle and brand shares data with platforms such as NAAMSA or Autostats,” explains Peter Gardner, Engagement Manager at Decision Inc. “These platforms contain high level data on sales across multiple brands and companies – Ford, Nissan, Toyota and other manufacturers. This data includes new vehicle sales, data in terms of units sold and pricing for each model, along with other relevant information. This information can be accessed by any organisation that participates in data sharing. The client was using the data for basic analytics, including insights into vehicle sales trends, year-on-year sales and performance. However, they were struggling to pull together the higher value analytics such as price positioning and pricing strategy from the data.”
The client wanted to deep dive into the data so that they could fully realise tactical decision-making, leveraging market insights and trends such as the growing demand for automatic gearboxes and the ability to better establish price positioning.
“We recognised the potential that existed within the data they were already using and designed a solution to leverage this data to enrich their existing reporting while also adding advanced analytics to improve their tactical and strategic decision-making,” says Gardner. “They needed to see not only how many units of each model was sold, but also how many units their competitors were selling and at what price points. We also included analysis of pricing strategies and configuration trends across all segments, to enable them to plan their market strategies more effectively.”
The solution requirements
The solution had to embody specific characteristics. It needed to take the requirements of performance, vehicle type, market and competitor and apply this to reporting that could determine forward applied price increases across the different vehicle ranges that are aligned with market and customer demand. This was particularly important in light of the company’s recent investment into its local manufacturing plant. The plant aims to produce 12 000 additional vehicles annually, which made insight into customer, market and pricing critical.
“We empowered our client to look at the leading players in the market segment and to see how they performed when compared to them,” says Gardner. “They could immediately see where the pricing gaps were, at what intervals they could apply price increases and so much more. The platform has allowed them to drastically change how they position their models at the right price and at the right time, a functionality they didn’t have before.”
The client now has access to market intelligence and automated reporting functionality and dashboards that analyse revenue, volumes, pricing, market share and segment trends. The dashboards can be customised to provide decision-makers with relevant insights that form strategy and planning.
“The system allows users to combine different vehicle characteristics like fuel, gear type and engine …….