Case study - Applied Business Intelligence in Automotive NPD Project Management

A geo-distributed team of more than 100 members belonging to engineering design, industrialization, sourcing, logistics and quality departments had to collaborate on a new car development project.

Adding to the complexity was the retreating COVID-19 pandemic which had severely restricted team members' in-person interactions and overall project-status visibility was poor across the board.

The main data-center of the project was a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system and customized databases maintained by each team disparately. There were discrete data extracts being generated on a daily basis from the PLM, but they were highly fragmented and unintuitive to use "out of the box". It was a classic case of "data-data everywhere, not an insight to use".

Conventional reporting and review mechanisms using old-fashioned spreadsheets and slide decks fell short, making review meetings long-drawn and laborious to find elusive actionable insights amid troves of data.

The sheer complexity and dynamism of the project demanded a "single source of truth" which could be used to conduct top-management reviews and simultaneously function as a self-service kiosk for the team members to plan and prioritize their activities.

Within few weeks, as a first-of-its-kind initiative, the founder of Optimus Consulting was able to quickly deploy a full-stack business intelligence solution within the customer's IT secure access environment including :

• Data lake and Data warehouse

• Custom-defined databases tailor-made to capture critical action points

• Semi-automated ETL routines to consolidate data from multiple sources

• Set of 7 screens within a single dashboard providing powerful analytics with complete visibility of all KPIs with drill-down capability

Result and Benefits

• The BI dashboards brought-up status summaries and actionable insights literally to the fingertips of team members and unlocked unprecedented levels of efficiency as everyone could refer to the same data effortlessly

• Using the powerful interactive capabilities built into the dashboards, team leaders and members could instantly visualize their contextual status and be better prepared with action plans

• The new car launch was achieved 4 months ahead of estimates.

• 60% increase in average number of issues closed per month and 45% reduction in issue life-span (from Opening to Closure in PLM)

• Annualized cost-saving - USD 500,000

• Activities of all geo-distributed team members (including remote workers) were synchronized for maximum productivity

An illustrative example of such a dashboard is shown below.

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