Case Study
European premium automaker re-engineers its digital sales journey
THE CLIENT
The client is one of the world's largest European premium automakers with a global sales network, 120,000 employees, 31 production and assembly facilities in 15 countries and 2.3M automobiles sold annually.
CHALLENGE
Overcoming time to market challenges
The client needed to improve the customer experience of their sales engagement, improve sales cycle time, track the sales process and reduce time to market for new product and promotions introduction. Only bits and pieces of the sales, inventory and delivery journey were digital, often taking them 6 months to roll out new features on their existing sales platform. In addition, they were not able to customize their offerings to specific markets. All together this was creating a significantly higher order to cash cycle than desired.
TRANSFORMATION
Bringing the entire sales ecosystem to a digital platform
UST proposed a fully digital platform-based approach, which made use of UST’s Transein platform. The uniqueness of this approach was the focus on the entire explore to delivery cycle and dealer ecosystem. The new platform was built with opensource software and created a single code base with global rules to maintain corporate standards while having flexibility to dynamically change local rules for a specific market. This provided flexibility to seamlessly integrate the needs and requirements defined by a country or region with those of dealers, financial services, ecosystem partners and worldwide corporate headquarters. The European automaker could now deliver a consistent end-to-end customer journey that represented their brand anywhere in the world. A combination of Java, SpringBoot, Postgres, Angular JS, with Google Analytics provided our client quick buyer behavior analytics across the digital journey, ease of platform customization and scalability without the threat of vendor lock-in when working on new feature development.
The new mobile friendly platform allowed clients to choose a car, customize its features, do a stock check online, select a dealer of choice, receive a quote, register for a test drive and track the order. It allowed dealers tracking and CRM functionality, and transparency to the automaker’s sales and management team for the respective countries.
IMPACT
Speed propels sales across markets
The fully mobile friendly platform provided a comprehensive sales cycle management system and a seamless customer journey resulting in increased sales especially during peak season within growth markets. Its scalability allowed for ease of redesign, future ecosystem partner expansion through lifestyle-as-a-service app integration, and quick sales promotion releases during holiday periods. The new platform reduced release time to 12 weeks rather than 6 months allowing for a 50% reduction in time to market. In addition, order to cash cycle was reduced by 20%.
EXPERTISE & RESOURCES
Discover our resources
Learn more about the expertise and resources that helped us achieve success on this project.
Digital Transformation Services | Digital Technology Solutions - UST
Manufacturing Technology Solutions & Consulting Services | UST
Business Strategy, Operations and Implementation Solutions | UST