Information Builders > Case Studies > Ford Motor Company: Leveraging Data Visualization for Warranty Repair Costs

Ford Motor Company: Leveraging Data Visualization for Warranty Repair Costs

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

WebFOCUS
Global Warranty Measurement System (GWMS)
GWMS EZ
126-EZ Report

Tech Stack

Data Visualization
Business Intelligence
Teradata Database

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Ford Motor Company is one of the world’s largest automakers, with 180,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $134 billion. The company's highly automated operation is largely controlled by information technology, both in its assembly lines and in the management tools it uses internally and distributes to its vast network of dealers. To monitor its worldwide business, Ford depends on business intelligence (BI) technology from Information Builders. WebFOCUS is the corporate standard for ad hoc reporting and BI throughout the company – both at Ford Motor Company and Ford Motor Credit Company.

The Challenge

Ford Motor Company, one of the world’s largest automakers, needed to help its thousands of dealers quickly identify and resolve problems with warranty repair costs. The company wanted to leverage its 15 years of historical data to mine new insights about manufacturing efficiency, supplier quality, and dealer repair trends. The challenge was to use data visualization techniques to present information in a way that general managers at each dealership could easily understand and compare their warranty repair costs to other dealers.

The Solution

Ford Motor Company, in collaboration with Information Builders, developed a new BI application called GWMS EZ and a new report called 126-EZ. These tools are now in production with 5,000 dealers throughout North America. The new 126-EZ Report takes information that was formerly displayed in rows and columns and presents it in a colorful, visual format of interactive charts and graphs. These real-time displays of each dealer’s warranty business leverage the three primary GWMS warranty metrics that Ford has tracked for nearly 15 years: Cost per vehicle serviced, Repairs per 1,000 vehicles serviced, and Cost per repair. The GWMS EZ reports can also be rendered on mobile devices, a useful feature as more dealers use tablets and smartphones throughout their businesses.

Operational Impact

Senior managers have greater transparency into their service and repair businesses.
All dealers have greater transparency into how their performance relates to their measurement group.
Dealers can see how many dealers are in the warranty counseling process and how many audits have been done.
Dealers can track the number of days it takes their shops to submit a claim after a repair order has been closed, compared to the national average.
Dealers can see the percentage of claims that are paid without being returned for correction, and dealership chargebacks for warranty parts not returned.

Quantitative Benefit