Moving Away From Complex Manual Reporting
Customer service lies at the heart of Thermo King Central Carolinas (TKCC) truck and trailer dealership business. With a service center open until 10 pm during the work week, 24-hour emergency service, and an expert staff committed to next-mile customer care, President Jim Christian tells us that this business is about having the right inventory, professionally trained technicians, and a customer-centric support system.
“Our customers appreciate the ongoing service and support we offer. The typical purchase cycle varies anywhere between five and ten years,” Jim explains, “so our business relies on long-term relationships, a team dedicated to service excellence, and exceeding our customers’ expectations.”
As a service-first organization, TKCC continually looks for ways to better support its customers by improving service quality, performance, and efficiency. However, their legacy business intelligence (BI) practices forced them to rely on manual data collection and reporting processes that were anything but efficient.
It used to take two to three days for the team to collect data for critical operational reports. Once they sat down to run reports, inaccurate data and complex manual calculations caused frustrating errors. In some cases, multiple people were pulling the same reports and getting different results. This left various departments with unreliable data and required other team members to spend hundreds of hours re-running reports to get back on track.
This dealership knew they needed a more accurate, efficient way to manage their BI processes, especially since nearly every team member was sinking time and expenses into tedious processes that weren’t yielding actionable insights.
Centralizing Data Sources Across the Dealership
Data is essential in TKCC’s efforts to prioritize the customer experience and move from a “feeling-based” decision-making process to a data-driven one.
To ensure frontline team members, department heads, and the leadership team could make timely, data-driven decisions, TKCC needed a BI solution that enabled them to use data to identify and close gaps in performance.
What’s more, the platform also needed to integrate well with their dealer management system, DIS Quantum, and the other industry-specific tools they use to manage their operations on a day-to-day basis.
DIS Quantum is complex, and extracting the data it produces typically requires technical knowledge.
Before TARGIT, TKCC worked with a BI software vendor that didn’t understand the nuances of their unique industry. This vendor wasn’t familiar with DIS and other dealer operating systems, making it virtually impossible for them to configure the reports and dashboards TKCC needed. The resulting solution didn’t come close to meeting TKCC’s business goals or the specific objectives on its strategic roadmap.
“We were especially impressed with TARGIT’s expertise in both BI and dealership operations,” recalls Jim. “I really appreciated that their team understood our business and provided us with solutions that perfectly matched our customer needs and our internal specifications.”
TKCC implemented TARGIT Decision Suite and its unique accelerator for DIS to:
- Automate reporting and data analysis
- Create custom reports and dashboards
- Generate reports in minutes instead of days
- Integrate DIS and other data sources into a single BI solution
The all-in-one platform came with pre-built reports and analyses that helped TKCC get up and running quickly without time-consuming manual setup tasks. The TARGIT team also provided strategic guidance on the most relevant metrics in the industry to ensure the team could maximize the value of the data they were pulling from their DIS and other sources. The result? A solution aligned with TKCC's specific goals that enables them to use data to better understand and serve their customers.
Kicking BI and Data Analysis Into High Gear With TARGIT
Today, TKCC primarily uses TARGIT in the Service and Aftermarket departments. Daily, they generate and review a comprehensive performance dashboard with department managers and frontline team members.
In addition to the critical financial reports, they also use automated reporting features in TARGIT to track monthly and quarterly goals related to Parts Availability, Dwell Time, and First-Time Fix Rate. These reports help them spot inefficiencies, monitor trends, and make informed decisions based on an up-to-date view of company performance.
The TKCC team also conducts comparative analyses for Parts & Service to measure positive and negative sales performance. Employees can use the results to pinpoint growth opportunities as well as identify areas that produced successful outcomes.
TKCC has only been using TARGIT for a few months, but they’re already planning for the future. The team wants to create new Inventory Exception reports during the slower season to identify obsolete parts, negative on-hand quantities, and current overstock. These reports will give their teams an up-to-date view of inventory availability that they can share with department managers or customers calling in to see if a specific part is in stock.
“The data we’ve surfaced through TARGIT has transformed how we solve problems and make decisions. It gives us a clear picture of our operations, including areas where we’re excelling and where we need to improve."
Creating a Roadmap for Continued Success
Jim believes that equipping his team with the right insights is the key to improving the customer experience and delivering exceptional service. As TKCC continues to expand its TARGIT implementation, Jim wants to be intentional about identifying which insights will be most valuable to his team and, ultimately, his customers.
“Everyone above our front line is already using TARGIT. For us, phase two isn’t about expanding who accesses the platform; it’s about enhancing how they use it and what insights it helps them uncover.”
The dealership prioritizes the teams’ buy-in and feedback as they identify what KPIs to measure in TARGIT moving forward, both in the Service department and other business areas.
Department managers and leadership teams are already asking questions about TARGIT and are eager to learn more about its capabilities and applications. TKCC holds monthly Parts Manager and Service Manager meetings where managers discuss how they’re using TARGIT and where it’s helping them make better business decisions. As Jim explains:
“TARGIT puts all of our data at our teams’ fingertips. We went from very little data to a whole bunch of data, so we want to be strategic about what we roll out next and how each report aligns with our business objectives and our customer experience.”
