End-to-end digital transformation of a leading Indian automobile retailer

What business problem did we solve?

The client engages in dealership of luxury cars, Mercedes Benz, for a period of 25 years. They also have a parallel business of buying and selling of pre-owned luxury cars in South Mumbai. The customers are from big corporate houses from Mumbai and the Bollywood industry. They are into this dealership business for many years but their process was highly manual and they did not have the correct infrastructure in place to automate the entire process. While it was becoming extremely time consuming and expensive to keep a track of the lead, the existing business also did not have any existing analytics system in place to analyze the performance of their efforts. Our engineers were entrusted to develop a customized cloud ERP for them which could drive cross-functional decision making.

How Bluetick Consultants made it happen?

Bluetick engineers developed a customized ERP solution for Sales, Procurement, marketing, customer support and functionalities of all departments. With notification, reminders and follow-ups for each individual, the ERP platform or the Lead Management System(LMS) was created. The system was capable of tracking the entire workflow end-to-end and thus with an appropriate sales-funnel design, the client could effectively design all data-driven metrics to analyze their sales performance. Along with the LMS, an e-commerce marketplace for buying and selling of pre-owned luxury cars with Autohangar trust and a pricing engine for buying a pre-owned luxury car built on historical/transactional data for instant decisions & close deals was also developed.

What technology solution we provided?

We talked to key stake holders, basically head of marketing, sales, customer service, procurement etc. and understood their day to day operations in detail. We clearly listed down the work/roles their team does (at present), the challenges they faced (in past), and insights they would like to have in the system to make their job effective (future aspirations). We laid out plan with modules, created user stories for each role (e.g. for sales department: Sales consultant, showroom hostess, sales team lead, showroom manager, VP Sales, Head of Sales, CEO)

Thereafter, we started developing system and took continuous weekly feedback from relevant key holders, incorporated their feedback and built ERP in around 6 months.

The key was to have process in ERP as similar as possible to the current operations, so Onboarding would be smooth and effectiveness of ERP would be realized within weeks.

Advantage Marketplace portal

It is a marketplace, where people can buy and sell luxury pre-owned cars. Team at Bluetick did user research and came up with various `luxury` designs, details on product customer may want on portal, cataloguing, filters.

In around 6 months, portal was launched and it was instant hit. Client was getting request to test drive the cars and sell their luxury cars. At this point, client gets around 30 quality leads per month from the portal.

Pricing Engine

When a customer wants to sell their luxury car to client, finding the right price was always a challenge. The delay in price communication could lead customer to explore other options or lose interest.

Team at Bluetick Consultants built a machine learning algorithm based on 20 years of price data of luxury cars in pre-owned marketplace based on 15 different data points and came up with price engine, which shows approximate price of a car based on model, year, color and km driven. It took around 2 months to gather data and another 2 to build it.

Pricing engine was dynamic in nature so price of same car would be different if you see if next month. This led our client to close more and good deals with instant communication of price and highly improved bottom-line by selling these cars after refurbishment.

What were the major challenges?

• Complex existing organization structure and inter-linkages among the business division
• Timely followups and reminders to customers were missed out due to human error
• Review and analysis of effort for each individual during monthly meetings
• Preparation of Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly reports for key metrics in excel
• No insights or sales funnel to improve the efforts on key business indicators
• ROI on for different marketing / sales channel were not clear

What results did our client get?

The internal audit team was the driver of the project. While the entire implementation not only helped our client to streamline the entire process, but also it enabled them to apply detailed analytics on top of the processed live-sales data and thus helping the management to take data-driven decisions. The cloud ERP implementation helped increasing the bottom-line for the client and also increased the efficiency of the business processes by 35%.