Line56.com: Real-Time Sales Information
Real-Time Sales Information
Mazda’s North American unit uses IBM software to get up-to-date information on car sales without replacing infrastructure or tying up bandwidth
Whenever someone buys a car from a Mazda dealership in the U.S. or Canada, Mazda North American Operations gets to know about it pretty quickly — in real time, in fact — as soon as the information enters a particular dealership’s system.
That wasn’t always the case. Not long ago, Mazda’s field sales managers could only look at sales data that updated every 15 minutes. Whether 15 minutes is quick or slow is really a matter of perspective, explains Joe Neria, a consultant who recently worked with Mazda. “To these guys it makes a big difference,” he says. “If you only know four times an hour, you can’t concentrate efforts on regions that aren’t pushing cars rapidly.”
Neria’s discussing the matter from the perspective of field sales managers who, particularly at month’s end, are under pressure to make sure that the company’s 700 dealerships are making their numbers.
Until a few months ago, these field sales managers used to get sales information in the form of a single file from the company’s mainframe. As Neria points out, the 15-minute delay made things made hectic for the field sales managers, but the download itself created bandwidth issues for everyone on the network. “Let’s say you have 70,000 records,” says Neria. “It’s like throwing 70,000 people through the door at once. Other users have slow response times.”
Neria was part of a team that helped Mazda get beyond these limitations. The key was IBM Information Management software, which taps into data that’s stored in other places — e.g. IBM DB2 Universal Database, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle — and maps it into a single DB2 environment. Users can’t tell that the data they see actually resides in different systems, and moreover can access that data in real-time, as car sales hit the systems of individual dealerships.
This takes care of a number of problems: field sales managers can track sales as they happen, users on the same system won’t have to suffer through slowdowns, and the costs of talking an alternate route have been avoided. Neria explains: “Otherwise, we would have had to rewrite their apps on a DB2 platform. It would have taken months, and the cost would have been a lot more.”
The application for looking at sales sites inside Mazda’s existing Web-based portal (provided by Plumtree) for dealers. Neria reveals that real-time tracking of part systems and service, among other applications, will begin soon.
