The role of sales analytics in auto manufacturing has changed the demand forecast picture completely. Sales analytics are looking at data such as unprofitable product lines, suppliers that are most likely to interrupt the production in the facility, competitive landscapes on sales incentives, and predictive analytics and machine maintenance.
The automotive industry used to have to look at past seasons’ performance, and try to forecast manufacturing targets based on limited information. However, current sales analytics allow auto manufacturers to track sales performance across timelines, regions, customers, and products, which in turn can give them a sense of how many units of each model line will find buyers.
Identification of Trends
By diving deep into historical process data, auto manufacturers can spot seasonal and non-seasonal trends, and can fine-tune their sales models to reflect the most current customer data. In addition, sales analytics allows for product margins and discounts to be maximized by region and product, so that sales can be fully driven with market promotions.
After all, what is the point of running sales promotions on autos if the customer base for that product line simply isn’t buying at the time? This updated demand forecast, based solely on the big data from sales analytics, is pushing the auto manufacturing industry into the predictive analytics market, and they’re reaping the full benefits of doing so.
Optimize Manufacturing Processes
In addition, the introduction of predictive analytics and machine maintenance can help keep the manufacturing lines running to maximize profit. After all, machine breakdowns lead to costly downtime on the production line. This can affect the overall production in a severely negative fashion.
However, by using predictive analytics to drive machine maintenance, engineers and line mechanics can perform machine rebuilds prior to critical breakdowns taking place, greatly reducing not only the cost of parts, but also the downtime and labor involved in getting the machine back online. This is a fantastic manufacturing tool that is helping auto manufacturers see record production numbers without sacrificing product quality in order to do so.
Identifying the Competitive Landscape
Sales analytics can also identify the competitive landscape on sales incentives, giving manufacturers, dealerships and retailers the edge on promotions and factory incentives. By analyzing the numbers before setting the promotion in stone, automotive sales teams can address promotions to the customer base that is actively shopping for a new automobile, and looking to be contacted about their future purchase.
This means the age of the cold call is nearly at an end, because lead driven sales analytics can identify and rate potential customers with solid data behind the leads, instead of buyers who are still in the “maybe” stage of buying. This, in turn can inform manufacturers of how well the product is doing and by comparing it to the competition determine what the can do to make a model stronger in the marketplace.
Elimination of Unfavorable Product Lines
Advanced analytics can also spot unprofitable product lines, and show real time profit and loss on a particular manufacturing aspect. If a certain model is no longer moving without huge discounts and incentives applied, sales analytics can identify that model and the average loss of profit that a retailer is seeing when pushing the inventory. This in turn can tell the builder when it’s time to consider revamping a product or eliminating it altogether.
Sales analytics have opened the auto manufacturing landscape to a new sales outlook, complete with data that can benefit both the consumer and the auto manufacturer simultaneously. The role of sales analytics in auto manufacturing is growing exponentially every day, and will drive the manufacturer forward as time passes.