Situation
A large Japanese automotive manufacturer wanted to improve their customer experience by giving their customers an online overview of only the accessories that can be fitted to their specific vehicle. Benefits would include greater opportunities for cross-sell and upsell and greater regulatory compliance.
To achieve the objective the customer needed to map all possible configurations of their local car configurations, accessories, accessory bundles and parts. In addition, data quality would need to be improved so an ongoing data validation and stewardship solution was required whilst respecting overall security and the protection of commercially sensitive R&D data.
Approach
Finding a way to link all accessories and parts to the right vehicles was a puzzle. This called for the creation of a new structure where all data linking accessory X to vehicle Y would be stored. Moreover, all product information needed to be centralised and for this purpose, a Product Information Management (PIM) system was chosen and customised/extended to meet the unique customer requirements.
Results
The manufacturer has successfully deployed multiple vehicle models and enabled regional organisations to build up their vehicle offerings in a way that improves their time to market and data quality. Time to completeness for new models for the manufacturer is reduced and target dates to complete the data before vehicle production starts are tracked.
