Finding a Scalable BI Solution
Great Plains Kubota has been selling tractors and equipment to customers across Oklahoma since 2004. The dealer group got its start in Southwest Oklahoma as a purely rental business, which eventually evolved into a dealership that also sold and serviced Kubota equipment.
Today, Great Plains Kubota has eight dealerships throughout the state, with plans to keep expanding its footprint. Alex Robles, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, explains that this continuous growth has led to significant changes in how the business runs at various levels:
“As we've grown and scaled, we've seen the need to evolve and do things differently in certain portions of the business,” says Alex. “For us, what it takes to run a successful business has changed over time. It takes a different approach at one store versus four versus eight versus 15, and so on.”
Alex started at Great Plains Kubota in 2011 as a Parts Manager. Today, he operates at a much more strategic level, combining his love for technology and computer science with his deep knowledge of the equipment industry to uncover new opportunities for the dealership.
He shares, “My current role allows me to utilize the relationships that I've built and the experience that I've gained by holding different roles in the company to help us see a path for growth that leverages technology and helps us remain profitable but also holds true to our people.”
To support that growth, Great Plains Kubota needed a BI solution that would generate actionable insights based on the latest company data. The solution also needed to be scalable and user-friendly, making it easy for employees across multiple locations and departments to access data within their day-to-day work.
They decided on TARGIT’s all-in-one BI solution for heavy equipment dealers, which would allow Alex and his team to combine data from multiple business systems, including their dealer management system (DMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
TARGIT’s consulting team also brought decades of industry and BI expertise to the table, giving Great Plains Kubota peace of mind and expert guidance at every step of their journey, from the initial implementation to their ongoing use of TARGIT Decision Suite.
"Where TARGIT came in and set itself apart was the people who work for TARGIT and their willingness to have a relationship with us and make Great Plains business their business, which has had a drastic impact on our utilization of the platform and the daily operations of our business.”
Increasing Data Visibility Across Operations
It once took just a handful of people to manage daily operations at Great Plains Kubota. But as the company scaled, so did the number of business leaders behind it. TARGIT has been a central part of keeping this growing group of stakeholders informed and ready to make critical business decisions.
Alex explains that this level of data visibility is essential not just for managers but across every part of Great Plains’ operations.
“Running a successful business requires us to share information in real-time and give more people the ability to make decisions based on accurate, timely information. We use TARGIT to see and understand where we are in terms of profitability and our people, where the market is, and how those things affect our business on a day-to-day.”
TARGIT enables Great Plains to bring information from multiple platforms together and then deploy it to various leaders and managers in the field. This level of visibility allows them to keep a current pulse on performance and trends, while also giving leadership the ability to forecast rather than always looking backward at data from the previous quarter or year. Alex shares, “We often use TARGIT to forecast and identify what we need to anticipate as opposed to looking at what's happened in the last month and then reacting on an assumption.”
Enabling Fast-Paced Decisions in Every Department
In the past, Great Plains Kubota’s leadership team often had to be very reactive to information because they didn't have a reliable, repeatable way to access up-to-date insights. Now, they trust TARGIT to bring together information from different business systems into a single source that generates up-to-date information based on trends inside the business and within the market.
Alex manages multiple reports that are automatically sent out to various leadership teams every day. Each report represents a different part of the company’s overall health and efficiency through sets of key metrics decided on by executive teams and department managers.
At the stores, TARGIT allows employees to understand how their department is performing and make informed decisions minute-to-minute.
For example, Parts Managers at each location use TARGIT to manage freight recovery, parts inventory, and overall inventory health, while technicians look at metrics like recovery and efficiency. They look at these numbers every day to understand the decisions they need to make and how those decisions tie back to their larger goals.
What’s more, the solution’s scalable, user-friendly design makes it easy for Alex to update, modify, and create new reports or dashboards to keep up with the pace of internal changes.
“With TARGIT, you can easily create new reports as you see fit in the evolution of your business, which has really made an impact for us. What was important maybe for a new time in our company last year might not be as important today, and what’s important today might be different in six months. So that day-to-day changes, but TARGIT can always flow with our business as we evolve.”
Using Data to Achieve Sustainable Growth
Alex shares that Great Plains Kubota is well-positioned for continued expansion in the years ahead – and data plays a vital role in how the company plans to grow.
“We rely on data to understand how each potential acquisition might affect our business. We evaluate what it could mean for us in terms of available income and what it could mean in terms of additional scale, and what we've seen over time is that scale helps us become better at what we do in this space."
Alex explains that opportunities to scale the business through acquisitions are often exciting and scary simultaneously because as you bring in other organizations, you're bringing in people and geographically expanding your footprint.
“All that becomes less scary when we know we can utilize data and information to help manage our business, and we're not just doing it from our gut as we’ve historically been guilty of,” Alex shares. “TARGIT allows us to take data from multiple platforms and bring it into a platform that helps us consume it, understand it, and act on it.”
So, no matter what exactly comes next for Great Plains Kubota, Alex is confident that data – and TARGIT specifically – will be a key part of the company’s continued growth and success. “The future brings a lot of excitement to Great Plains, and TARGIT plays an integral role in how we plan to go into our industry and make an impact like we've never seen before.”
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