Background
Since Estonia launched taxes for new car registration, the local sales have been on their knees, with massive drop in new car sales. Companies have, in some occasions, lost half of their revenue, profit, and cash. Companies are looking for ways to survive.
Car sales & service companies in the Baltics use different software for their day-to-day. Automaster & Axapta to name a few, with new, innovative software coming in every year for different purposes of the business: sales, maintenance, guarantee work, accounting, marketing, you name it. The challenge is – none of these awesome tools provide end-to-end data solutions for decision making and business management. Example: Modera is awesome for new car sales, but it’s mostly awesome for this part of the business only. Automaster is good for maintenance, but it does not do accounting. Accounting software does not do sales nor maintenance at all. ERP (Enterprice Resource Planning) software like Axapta are covering all the basic needs but are not perfect for managing any specific business process.
We at Dataverk have been supporting car sales & service companies for years with their individual needs; hence, we know the business, data, and tools inside out. When the business is booming, efficiency and maxing out sales & profit throughout the business might not be the key focus point. It’s opportunities like these that pivot the businesses and make them look for areas for improvement. And this is what we did – launching an end-to-end intelligent, analytical data model for car sales and service companies to utilise the potential thus far, has not been done.
Our Solution
We tie up all the data from all software in use, add logical, external, relevant data points (for example, weather), and provide a fast, effective, intuitive discovery & decision-making tool for the businesses. The model provides the following benefits:
- Simple, secure, low resource, easy and fast
- Business-relevant language
- Business-relevant, purpose-based views
- Single source of truth for all teams and departments
- Connects data end-to-end – from sales offer to work to invoice and settlement
- Predefined metrics & KPI’s, graphs, trends, reports, deepdives by department, team, operation and resource with option to extend as required
- Shows it all – all data from all sources, nothing is hidden or deleted
- Validates and alerts for missing, changed, or incorrect data
- AI model for pro-level challenges
And the beauty of it, in most cases ,we can utilise the already available database tools that exist in-house, be it Microsoft SQL server or PostgreSQL Server. For analytical outputs, again existingin-house tooling can be used – usually Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services & MS Excel Pivot/Powerpivot are commonly by end users but we recommend also to try MS Power BI, Apache Superset & Looker on top of out our analytical model.
Outcome
With the newly designed model, companies can solve the following challenges:
- Increase revenue, profit, and cash flow
- Increase efficiency with team and department-based metrics and data
- Understand and manage capital expenditure to maximum utilisation
- Make marketing to only profitable product and service combinations
- Understand and manage marketing impact by business department
- Understand if resources & investments make money or lose money
- Properly manage cash flow and owner expectations
- Discover process inefficiencies
- Plan, budget & forecast
Why is this important?
Analytical models are safe, effective, and brilliant tools to scale the business and make the most use of the data that is collected from various software. Usually, software providers focus on keeping the software up and running, whilst building end-to-end data connections and providing a base for business decisions is out of focus for them. This is what we focus on – providing the real business impact from all the various software & data sources that truly move the business. The business-based models we provide can be used as they come “out-of-the-shelf” or be easily tweaked and developed based on the challenge at hand.
Usually, personnel try to hack and “excel” the challenge away manually with another Excel Spreadsheet or manual one-off analysis, based on their best, limited understanding, but this rarely works, nor is it complete, reusable, and scalable. No matter the challenge at hand, Your business most probably already has the relevant data to solve for it; it is the logical connections, enrichment, attribution, and skills that are missing to make the data work.
Did we get Your thinking going on what You want to discover & improve in Your business?
Great! Share Your challenge!