1. Client Background

Client was a mid-sized aftermarket automotive parts producer. They struggled to get information between Engineering and Marketing, then from Marketing to the customer.

2. The Challenge

The client had a few problems that they were struggling with:

• As Engineering developed new products, they were inconsistent with sharing data with Marketing. They would omit necessary things, they used different descriptors, and they didn’t follow a timeline.

• Marketing did not have a good method to easily share what products they had available with distribution center customers and other resellers.

• These issues cost the Director of Marketing hours of wasted time every week. He would regularly lose 8 full hrs + per week just trying to fill in data gaps and format information to enter into the customers’ databases.

3. The Approach

For this challenge, we had to go deep much earlier in the process because we needed to understand:

• The engineering development process.

• What information Marketing needed from engineering and when.

• What data Marketing wanted to have to share with customers.

• What format did Marketing need that customer data to be in.

4. The Solution

We developed a system that:

• Laid out a clear format for engineering to enter data.

• Gave Marketing the ability to see the data, and enter their own data.

• Provided a storage for all parts numbers.

  • It included a method to obsolete parts, and generate a list of obsoleted parts.

• Provided Marketing with a simple way to export information to send to customers.

  • It had a subsection that made it easy to find replacement components that were wear items within the kits.

  • It also held all of the pricing for all the kits, and had an automated system for updating pricing during price increases.

5. The Results

This became the marketing data backbone of the business. It was named “Master Data File” and was the most critical tool and data storage for the Marketing and Engineering teams. It saved innumerous hours for the Director or Marketing, it completely dissolved all issues uploading data into the customer databases, and it gave engineering a template to re-develop their product development process, which we supported as well.

6. Key Takeaways / Lessons Learned

Simplicity is always key. Some things inevitably will become complex, but we focus on eliminating or automating those, leaving only the simple aspects in front of the users. This was key here.