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Scale Up and Improve Your Operations

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Outline the key features that help improve dealer and fleet operations.
  • Explain how to track and manage inventory in Automotive Cloud.
  • List key components of Flow for Automotive.
  • Explain how CRM Analytics for Automotive Cloud supports data-driven decisions.

Drive Operational Efficiency and Excellence

OK, so Zia knows how Automotive Cloud unites stakeholders and connects vehicle and customer data. Now let’s examine some features that help companies like Neo Motors streamline internal processes and achieve operational excellence. 

At Neo Motors, agents and service technicians are tied to specific customer locations. Inventory managers, sales managers, and finance teams typically operate from specific branches. With Branch Management, you can track user performance and productivity at specific branches. And with Record Association Builder, you can automatically link leads, cases, accounts, and contacts to different branch units in the company. 

A Branch Unit record and the Dealer Branch selector in Automotive Cloud.

Service Process Studio is a tool for orchestrating an end-to-end service process, from request intake through to fulfillment. Ready for more good news? Neo Motors can use Service Process Studio to design processes like manual update of forms, creation of cases, and retrieval of data using a guided flow. Integrations, business logic, and aggregations help businesses create ready-to-use actions that service agents can launch quickly during customer calls, right from the Service Console.

The New Service Process window showing templates for creating automotive-specific service definitions.

Sales and service teams must constantly reach out to prospects and customers through various engagement and outreach activities. 

An Actionable List showing all members whose vehicles are due for recalls and service.

With Actionable Segmentation, another feature available in Automotive Cloud, Neo Motors can use outreach lists and actionable lists to segment and curate similar client profiles and design timely and personalized client outreach programs.

Be Prepared for Scale and Growth

Zia’s enlightenment continues as she discovers additional features that work seamlessly with Automotive Cloud. Here’s how each department at Neo Motors can use a particular feature.

Next, Zia learns about inventory management. In this regard, Neo Motors is in dire need of transformation.

Search Your Inventory and Track Products

Inventory managers at Neo Motors need better traceability of vehicle inventory to plan for product replacements and replenishments and meet customer demands. Automotive Cloud supports multiple objects in the data model so you can track vehicles and parts at different locations and monitor product transfers and requests. 

Here are just a few objects Neo Motors can use to track product inventory and movement.

  • Product Item
  • Product Item Transfer
  • Product Item Transaction
  • Serialized Product
  • Associated Location
  • Product Request
  • Product Request Line Item
  • Product Fulfillment

A magnifying glass looking into vehicles across multiple locations.

And to top it off, with the Criteria-Based Search and Filter feature, teams can search for vehicles across locations by choosing filters and then grouping, aggregating, and sorting the results. 

Vehicle Inventory Search in Automotive Cloud.

Let's say an inventory manager wants to analyze the product mix across dealer locations in Denver, Colorado. They can apply criteria like brand name, exterior color, vehicle model, transmission type, or any other vehicle attribute and set the distance criteria to determine the radius of the search. The best part is that admins can tailor the search experience to fit the needs of the inventory team like a custom-made suit. 

Zia checks out How Does Vehicle Inventory Search Work in Automotive Cloud to understand the feature better.

Scale Up with Automation

One of the main reasons that businesses fail to scale up is the lack of automation. Zia finds out that Automotive Cloud comes with Flow for Automotive, a toolset that includes multiple low-to-no code tools for automating complex business workflows. She briefly outlines each tool.

  • Business Rules Engine: A collection of objects, services, and components for automating complex decision-making and business processes. Use decision tables to define decisions and actions based on predefined business logic.
  • Data Processing Engine: An Extract-Transform-Load tool that orchestrates end-to-end data transformation and aggregation. It can aggregate, group, join, filter, slice, apply formulas, and write back a large volume of data.
  • Document Generation: Unifies document management and creation. Use it to design DOCX and PPT document templates, create business-critical documents, and coordinate document intake.
  • OmniStudio: A suite of drag-and-drop components that help you create branded digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.
  • Flow Builder: A point-and-click tool that helps you automate repetitive tasks, create guided interactions, and define complex business workflows.

Make Business Decisions with Effective Analytics

The key to a good business is making data-driven decisions based on intelligent, real-time insights. The beauty of having vehicle, customer, dealer, and retail data all on one platform is that you can use this to uncover deep insights.  

Automotive Cloud is powered by CRM Analytics, which breaks down complex data and helps managers derive key insights. The Analytics for Automotive template comes with a set of predefined dashboards tailor-made to analyze a company's performance based on sales lifecycle, revenue trends, inventory, vehicle portfolio, and leads data. Sales and service teams at Neo Motors can monitor business performance and respond to customer changes faster and with greater precision. 

The Dealer Performance dashboard in Automotive CRM Analytics.

Automotive Analytics offers intelligence to OEMs and dealers through several dashboards.

  • The Dealer Performance dashboard provides an inner view to a company’s performance based on top metrics and time-series projections. Use the dashboard to analyze sales trends, region-wise revenue trends, leads to opportunity conversions, and inventory mix and age.
  • The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Sales and Performance dashboards help you dive deeper into a company’s performance based on top metrics and time series projections. Use the dashboard to analyze sales, manage inventory, and track product performance.
  • The Leads Intelligence dashboard provides insights into your lead conversion rates to help identify high-value leads. Use these data-driven insights to prioritize and focus on the right leads for conversion efficiency and performance tracking.
  • The Vehicle Portfolio Insights dashboard provides an overview of your vehicle portfolio and helps prioritize the vehicles based on warranty expiry, work order details, and recalls. Use the dashboard to enable targeted and timely actions for improved service experience.

Automotive Analytics also includes dashboards that help you uncover information related to revenue realization, product and account performance, sales target attainment, pricing analysis, and whitespace analysis.

Take the Path Ahead

Zia led the design and implementation of an Automotive Cloud solution for Neo Motors. Once the solution was in place and teams onboarded, the digital transformation had begun. 

Automotive Cloud has transformed every aspect of the business, and Neo Motors has brought the customer to the forefront of their business decisions. They’re now positioned to nurture deeper relationships with all their stakeholders, improve their collaboration with the dealer ecosystem, and optimize their operational efficiency for scalability. 

Can you envision how Automotive Cloud could transform your business?

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