Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Premium Car Retailer Enhances Performance with Innovative Reporting Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Retail and hospitality—Motor vehicles and parts dealers
Customer Profile
Inchcape is a global car retailer and distributor. It employs more than 14,000 people at 200 locations. In 2007, it achieved more than U.S.$520,000 in profit, representing a 20 per cent increase on 2006.
Business Situation
The company had more than 10 different IT systems. Data had to be extracted and consolidated manually, which made it difficult for employees to get timely, accurate information on operations.
Solution
Inchcape worked with Microsoft® Business Intelligence Partner of the Year IMGROUP to deploy a centralised data solution, based on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005. The solution quickly consolidates business data.
Benefits
Improved performance
Enhanced services
Supported operations
Added value
/ “IMGROUP is backed by extensive experience and responded quickly with a remedy for every technical and business challenge we conceived.”
Nigel Woodman, IT Project Manager, Inchcape
Leading car retailer Inchcape sells premium brand cars in 25 countries at over 300 locations worldwide. The company has a strong focus on customer service and operational excellence and employees need access to timely, accurate data on sales, financial performance, and customer behaviour to achieve business goals. The company wanted to find a reliable solution that could consolidate business data from its disparate systems, and provide employees with the tools to support personal and group-wide key performance indicator (KPI) targets. In 2006, Inchcape began working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner IMGROUP, which helped the company deploy a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and Microsoft PerformancePoint™ Server 2007. With the solution, employees work with timely, sophisticated data on operations and customer behaviour supporting company growth and the development of new markets.
Situation
Inchcape has a long and successful history that spans over 160 years. The company’s origins are in shipping and trading, but in 1999 it became an automotive retail business. Since then, Inchcape has rapidly become one of the world’s leading car retailers with operations in Australia, Belgium, China, Greece, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.The group also has operations in other markets, including Eastern Europe, the Baltic regions, and South America.It represents leading automotive brands and operates in a purely retail, or vertical integration—distribution and retail—model. Current manufacturer partners include Toyota/Lexus, Subaru, BMW, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, and Honda. The company employs more than 14,000 people and is considered a major global player in the retail automotive sector.
Already successful, Inchcape is set to move into new geographic markets—illustrated by the opening of a Lexus retail outlet in the city of Shaoxing, mainland China, and its acquisition of 30 new retail centres in Moscow. With such a broad scope of business activities, it’s important that employees can easily track the performance of different divisions, regions, and business lines. Nigel Woodman, IT Project Manager at Inchcape, says: “It’s our goal to become the most customer-centric automotive retailer in the world, so we also need excellent business intelligence, and insight into our perception among customers.”
But, until recently, the company had relied on a manual reporting system, where local IT teams extracted data on sales and services from a disparate collection of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, collated it into a report spreadsheet, and sent it through the post to head office in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Woodman says: “We assessed all our retail and distribution centres, and discovered that within 200 locations there were approximately 10 different IT systems. Some companies had the same systems, but different versions. It was very time consuming and labour intensive for my team to consolidate it into useful business reports.”
Inchcape wanted to find a way of connecting all business data and providing a consistent, comprehensive view of operations for employees. Woodman says: “We also needed to communicate key performance indicator (KPI) information, analyse customer behaviour in more detail, and compare factors behind the success of different outlets.”
In June 2006, Inchcape searched for a solution that could consolidate the company’s valuable business data, and provide employees with the tools to:
Create timely accurate reports on sales, service, and customer behaviour
Compare divisional and regional performance across the group
Create and communicate standard KPIs
Solution
In July 2006, Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner of the Year IMGROUP worked with Inchcapeto help it plan and deploy a centralised, Web-based, warehouse, and reporting solution based on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software.
The IMGROUP solution for Inchcape integrates data from all of the company’s business applications into a centralised repository using the Microsoft .NET Framework. Features such as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, provide employees with comprehensive analytics, and reporting tools. IMGROUP also built a complementary dashboard solution with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007 business intelligence software—previously ProClarity Analytics Server—that displays KPI data in customised views on employees’ personal computers.
Solution features include:
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services—this is a customised reporting tool, which employees can use to create templates and reports that suit unique business information requirements. Woodman’s team created nine standard Inchcape templates for employees to calculate the KPIs required by all business divisions.
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services—this is a comprehensive analytics tool that is easily configured to incorporate business logic, specific metrics, calculations, and other requirements, into the data for analysis.
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007—this displays KPI information at a glance. It is easily customised, and provides complex information to employees in a scorecard format that is easy to understand and process.
To access the data warehouse, employees click on a link in the favourites menu of their browser. This takes them to the secure warehouse application on the company’s intranet, where they can run any of the report templates. Woodman says: “With a Web-based application, we can ensure that employees at all our divisions—from Ethiopia to Australia—can access the solutioneasily. As the company acquires new outlets, it is simple to connect existing systems to SQL Server 2005, and incorporate the business data straightaway.”
IMGROUP supported the team with extensive dashboard development, and ensured that the desktop applications could provide the data required by different business teams. Woodman says: “IMGROUP is backed by extensive experience and responded quickly with a remedy for every technical and business challenge we conceived.”
Benefits
With the system in place, Inchcape employees have timely access to valuable business data and the tools to support informed, innovative, and responsive business operations. Woodman says: “From South America to Western Europe, Russia, and Australia, our executives can log on each morning, and see exactly how the business has performed in the previous 24 hours. It’s a massive achievement considering the spread of our markets.”
Executives View and Compare KPIs on Personal Dashboards
“With Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, all employees have at-a-glance views of operations, in the format that works best for them and is appropriate to their roles and requirements,” says Woodman. For example, the Chief Executive Officer and other company executives are equipped with a giant plasma screen that displays their personal dashboard views and KPIs in the context of group-wide operations.
Other employees, such as local sales and marketing managers, can see information on a various factors, including the number of cars sold by brand in different locations. “For example,” says Woodman, “retail outlets in Australia sell multiple brands from the same location. But the sales manager for Hyundai could compare his or her sales figures to the Kia manager on the same site—or to a regional manager’s site based in Chile.”
Customer Service is Enhanced with Detailed Behaviour Analysis
As part of a drive to improve its customer service, Inchcape uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) programme for measuring customer satisfaction. Woodman says that the solution plays a significant role in the programme’s success. “SQL Server 2005 reliably manages the thousands of NPS customer responses we have to collect, and provides employees with tools to perform quick, accurate analysis of the responses.”
Originally, the company focused purely on the customer service delivery within its retail outlets, but the scalability of the solution has meant that Inchcape has extended the NPS programme to its service departments, which provide customers with warrant of fitness checks, annual car service, and mechanical repairs.
“Knowing what our customers like and what they dislike about our products and services means that Inchcape can be responsive to customer needs—employees can respond with new processes as required,” says Woodman.
Employees Use Insight to Increase Growth and Profit
Since the dashboard and reporting solution went live, Woodman says that the profitability of the business has significantly increased—it is now one of the most successful automotive retailers in the world. He’s confident that this profit is aligned to the company’s strong focus on customer service, and the fact that employees can effectively monitor and manage their KPIs and regional, divisional, or local business challenges.
He says: “With the NPS programme, area managers can see instantly how their divisions are performing, compared to other divisions and offices. If another area is doing particularly well in the same area, they can find out what that area does differently, and apply this to the processes in their own divisions.”
IT Employees Easily Support Internal Processes
One of the challenges facing large, dispersed organisations is ensuring that useful ideas and processes are quickly communicated across the company. But with SQL Server 2005, it’s easy for Woodman’s team to customise report templates that serve the company’s best interests. He explains: “Employees at one of our Singapore offices were re-populating their own reports with the data on a specific dashboard KPI. We realised that the format they created would be useful for everybody, so we added it to the group-wide templates on the intranet. Not only has that saved time for the Singapore office, it also provides value to the rest of the business.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
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Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organisations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of the Microsoft Server Product Portfolio, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.
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