Data Analytics Solution for Luxury Vehicle Dealers

Summary

A European provider of enterprise software for the automotive industry needed a global analytical system with rich reporting for car manufacturers and their dealer networks. INNERLUXES acted as technical consultant and built a multilingual business-intelligence solution — an ETL-based data warehouse with multidimensional cubes, security models, integration modules, and dozens of customizable reports and interactive dashboards — enabling data-driven decisions across vehicle sales, service, spare parts, and finance.

About the Client

The Client is a major provider of enterprise software products tailored to the automotive industry — including solutions for dealer management, customer and vehicle relationship management, and business intelligence. Based in Europe and represented internationally, the company serves a large base of clients and car dealerships around the world.

The Challenge

The Client chose INNERLUXES as a technical consultant to create an analytical system with rich reporting functionality for the internal purposes of car manufacturers and their dealer networks. The system was meant to cover different business areas of the automotive industry — automobile sales and services, spare-parts tracking, and financial analysis. As the dealer networks involve international users, the system also had to provide a multilingual interface.

The Solution

Together with the Client's team, INNERLUXES's BI implementation team designed and developed an ETL-based Data Warehouse (DWH) that includes a data staging area to avoid gathering irrelevant information from a variety of sources. To cover the required business areas, four data marts were created and merged inside the DWH.

Four multidimensional Microsoft cubes were created to maximize the depth of analysis:

• Vehicles
• Spare parts
• Service
• Finance

Security models covering data-usage permissions were implemented for each of the analytical cubes.

To load information into the staging databases and DWH, the team developed integration modules. Internal company systems (CRM), diverse SQL databases, and Excel and flat files with different structures are used as data sources. Two ways are available for displaying reports: SQL Server Reporting Services available within a SharePoint portal, and PowerPivot models in Excel.

To support data-driven decisions, INNERLUXES created over 40 customizable reports as well as interactive dashboards with the ability to track KPIs, assign tasks and goals, collaborate, and share important information. Reports can be drilled down by various criteria, including time period (from a single day to the whole period), spare-parts categories and types, and the brands and makes of vehicles and service stations.

The system was designed to support three languages to cater for dealers from different countries — all metrics and reports are available in the appropriate language.

The Results

• INNERLUXES created a complete performance-management system that enables data collection and analysis across the required business areas: vehicle sales and after-sales service, spare-parts availability and sales, and financial reporting.
• The system lets automotive retailers explore data visually and analytically, enabling decisions based on up-to-date information.
• All tests on the customer environment were successfully passed, and the system is used by a large automobile dealer.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft Integration Services 2008, Microsoft Analysis Services 2008, Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPivot, T-SQL, MDX.