WITH MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT FROM TIBCO
The automotive sector has seen better days. Sales of new cars are declining. Tax measures are having a major impact on the sector. Automotive companies from small to large need to know how to adapt. This is perfectly possible, as long as your information supply is in order. Pon noticed this when it started using EBX from TIBCO.
As an international trade and service organisation with a wide variety of activities, Pon is one of the Netherlands’ largest family-run companies. Pon Automotive in Leusden has long been the cornerstone of the Pon group. It is the importer of, among others, Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT, Škoda and Porsche. Thanks to good partnerships with manufacturers on the one hand and the dealer network on the other, Pon Automotive has built up an excellent market position.
Never in the past 45 years have so few new cars been sold as they are today. The changes in the market also bring growing dynamics in Pon Automotive’s retail network, leading to name changes, closures and takeovers of dealerships. To keep a grip on this development, Pon drew up a so-called dealer blueprint several years ago. This is implemented by concluding a new dealer covenant with selected Strategic Retail Partners of some brands. This means that reliable and up-to-date partner information is crucial for the smooth running of processes such as Channel Management: historical and reliable information is necessary for the successful management and processing of the (strategic) partners. Moreover, Pon wants to be able to make analyses & planning (simulation). Contract management is another such process: this can only be performed adequately if the master data of the contracted parties are up-to-date and reliable. Performance measurement is also important. In order to monitor and report KPIs, up-to-date and complete partner information is necessary.
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The existing information solution (Lotus Notes) was unable to support all this. “Dealers are being acquired, quitting or merging. Everything is changing; we have to deal with a lot of uncertainties in our market. We need to be able to act quickly. Then IT should not get in the way.” So says Klaas Pieter Roemeling, Director of Dealer Management at Pon’s Automobielbedrijven. Roemeling oversees an organisation of 150 employees who provide service to the more than 300 dealerships of the car brands in the portfolio. Pon set up a very thorough selection process in search of a suitable MDM solution and based on a self-developed, well thought-out architecture. Of the 12 parties on the longlist, Systemation with EBX ultimately proved to offer the best proposition. “Even in the demo phase, Systemation showed that EBX from TIBCO exactly matched our requirements.” So says Erik Portman, Retail Network Advisor and during the selection and implementation the ‘business owner’ of the project. “Systemation had studied our business and our organisation very well. That made their offer extra convincing.
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