is becoming
is becoming
In the competitive business of luxury cars, data matters. For Jaguar Land Rover South Africa (JLRSA), manual reporting processes slowed down management access to company-wide data from sales to billing, hampering their ability to make agile decisions. The company turned to data analytics specialist and Google Partner, DotModus, one of Digicloud Africa’s resellers, to supercharge reporting with a Google Cloud solution.
Although the burden of manual reporting was manageable at department level, it left company-wide reporting at JLRSA stuck in the slow lane. Consolidating department-level data required time-consuming manual extraction from multiple large spreadsheets. Creating stakeholder reports was equally manual, with changes to views or source data setting off a chain of time-consuming rework. All these manual processes put the brakes on the business, limiting agility and increasing the risk of decision-making based on inaccurate data.
Working with Google Partner and Digicloud Africa reseller DotModus, JLRSA decided to take reporting up a gear with a fast, automated, centralised Google Cloud solution.
Step one was to custom-build data pipelines to automatically gather and organise data from multiple applications and on-site messaging systems into a centralised Google BigQuery database. Created and managed with Google Cloud Build, Google Cloud Composer, and a managed version of Apache Airflow, each pipeline gathers data in daily, weekly or monthly batch processes aligned to reporting needs. Once data is uploaded to the database, any failed imports or discrepancies are identified by Google Operations (formerly Google Stackdriver), triggering an alert to ensure the issue is addressed before the data feeds into reporting.
With a well-organised, accurate dataset in place, DotModus deployed Google’s dashboarding and reporting tool, Google Data Studio, to add the presentation layer. Connecting seamlessly to the centralised database, the tool delivers nine bespoke interactive dashboards that aggregate and filter data from dealer and product performance metrics to billing and vehicle financing.
By transforming how data is analysed, presented and accessed, JLRSA now has the decision-making agility its innovative business demands. Instead of out-of-date, error-prone data presented in inflexible formats, decision-makers across the business can explore real-time, accurate and relevant data at the touch of a button.
Delving deeper into the data is now quick and easy with real-time filtering and instant search on each of the nine dashboards. For example, if the dealership team want to compare dealership sales of a particular model in a particular month, they can access that information down to body and trim colour in less than five minutes. At the opposite end of the scale, aggregating data for senior executives is handled just as easily.
In addition to these core benefits, Google’s free-to-use model for Google Data Studio (with no per-seat or per-instance licenses) has helped JLRSA build user acceptance of the change. Any staff member on the JLRSA domain with the relevant permissions can access the dashboards without additional approvals, vastly easing the onboarding process.
