BI Tools: One Place To Manage All Your Business

The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) published that the average franchised dealer has upwards of 2 dozen applications in their business. There are no statistics in the United Kingdom, but the typical dealership has many applications. Each of these was chosen for good reasons, either they were the best of breed for the requirement such as a Vehicle Health Check (VHC) solution or they were mandated by the car manufacturer, such as a Showroom application.

Each year the dealership needs to plan for the following year with the input from each of its franchisors. It is critical to track performance as the year unfolds and adjust management focus accordingly.

To maximise business performance, the main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in each business area need to be tracked daily. Well communicated objectives to each of the managers and team members combined with real-time tracking lead to the best performance. For example, to maximise the hours sold in workshops, there must be a target for each location by the service advisor and by a service technician and this must be matched with the actual performance.

Nothing new here, except this requires the budget/plan numbers to be matched against the actual performance. These numbers sit in many locations such as the Dealer Management System (DMS), workshop loading, and VHC. All but the very largest dealerships struggle to pull these reports together in a timely and accurate manner that can be fed out to all the team members in an easy-to-use format.

Too often, decisions taken in multi-rooftop franchised dealers are made by gut feeling backed up with incomplete data.

Some auto dealer groups’ business performance suggests they get it right more often than they get it wrong. However, increasing competition, the change in the way consumers buy, EVs, and external factors such as Covid and Brexit etc mean this is no longer sustainable. On top of this, the sales channel to the consumer is changing. Manufacturers have issued notices to their franchisors that they will be changing to an agency model.

Other sectors have gone through disruptive changes and there have been big winners in the end. One consistent characteristic of these winners is the way they use data differently from those that don’t.

Just a few examples:

• Increasing the accuracy, quality and yield of biopharmaceutical production.
  • Increased the vaccine’s yield by 50%, worth between $5M to $10M in yearly savings for a single vaccine alone.
• Production metrics.
  • Better forecasts of product demand and production + 46%
  • Understanding plant performance across multiple metrics + 45%
  • Providing service and support to customers faster + 39%

Source: McKinsey & Company - How big data can improve manufacturing July 2014

Data Analytics or Business Intelligence (BI) has been around for a long time. So why haven’t we seen more solutions in the Automotive dealership space and why are they appearing now?

• Transaction software suppliers generally have not been successful at providing BI or analytics solutions. Their architecture, tools and skillsets are not an ideal mix for analytics solutions.
• Modern tools developed for Big Data have recently become easier to use and provide visualised outputs so that information can be absorbed more effectively and quicker.
• The transactional software suppliers have opened up access to the data.
• Analytics requires significant hardware resources and recent performance advances in technology have been an enabler.
• Cloud solutions have become more acceptable and are cheaper to build.
• The need is greater now as discussed above.

RWA Automotive has built a secure cloud BI solution specifically for franchised and non-franchised dealers which is used by 3 of the top 20 dealers in the UK and in other dealerships with as few as 4 rooftops. It is the one place they go to manage their whole business. The CEO can see everything that is going on in one graphical dashboard. Function heads (Sales, Aftersales, Brand Managers, CFO etc.) can have a drillable dashboard which brings data in from their DMS and their third-party applications and these are blended with their budgets and targets. Exceptions are dealt with on the fly at all levels in the company. Automated DOCs for Sales and Aftersales give the branch managers and their people the information they need to deliver on the daily objectives.

RWA provides unique modules for sale of new and used vehicles, stock management for vehicle & stock and service managers. There are multiple business development tools for each department, click here or contact us for more details. Check out our customers’ success stories here.