Volkswagen Group Australia

"Working with Professional Advantage was very easy. The team was professional and response times were excellent. There wasn’t a single problem they couldn’t overcome, and they delivered beyond what we had requested in terms of project scope. The overall experience exceeded our expectations."

Niveshn Chetty, Warranty Operations Team Leader

Organisation

Volkswagen Group Australia imports, wholesales, and distributes Volkswagen and Škoda vehicles throughout Australia. As a subsidiary of Europe’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen Group, it takes care of all local operations. This includes warranties and liaison with authorised dealers.

Need

When a Volkswagen or Škoda vehicle needs a repair under warranty, the owner takes it to an authorised dealer. The dealer sends claim details to Volkswagen Group Australia, and is reimbursed for work performed.

Volkswagen Group Australia collects and maintains extensive warranty records as a result. These records date back more than a decade and include:

• Types of claims submitted – and under what type of warranty
• Dealer reimbursement amounts classified into broader categories
• Claims per individual vehicle, model, transmission and engine type

Volkswagen Group Australia departments regularly requested reports based on this data. However, creating timely reports was easier said than done.

With no business intelligence (BI) or reporting tool, warranty team members produced reports in Excel. They had to sift through massive volumes of data, which meant it could take days to generate a single report and they also faced the limitation of Excel in dealing with large numbers of data rows.

Earlier attempts to resolve the problem had failed. Volkswagen Group Australia had engaged an overseas provider to come up with a reporting solution, but language barriers and communication difficulties hampered progress. It chose to wrap up the project and engage an Australian provider instead.

In addition to local support, the selected provider needed to deliver a comprehensive solution that would:

• Require minimal training to use.
• Reduce time taken to produce standard and ad hoc reports.
• Provide insights into monthly warranty claim trends.
• Improve data analysis capabilities.
• Consolidate data from multiple systems in a single dashboard.
• Eliminate Excel spreadsheets for reporting.

Solution

After extensive research, Volkswagen Group Australia chose Qlik Sense for their ease of use, powerful data visualisation capabilities and ability to scale from leading BI vendor Qlik.

Qlik Australia recommended Professional Advantage as the implementation partner. With over 90 years’ combined experience delivering BI solutions, it trusted Professional Advantage’s Qlik team to achieve a winning outcome.

Professional Advantage worked with Volkswagen Group Australia to:

• Identify warranty-related key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Extract data from the warranty mainframe system, additional classifications from Excel and ten years of sales records to make KPIs available via Qlik Sense
• Build Qlik Sense dashboards to provide warranty adjudicators with easy-to-digest data visualisations
• Educate warranty adjudicators in how to create custom visualisations and reports so they can view data in a way that makes sense to them

The solution provides the warranty team with instant access to data including claims submitted by each dealer, highest claiming dealerships, warranty costs, and labour costs by claim type. Warranty adjudicators can quickly create reports and visualisations that highlight trends and claim distribution.

Warranty data can be sliced and diced by state, dealer type or individual dealer, or filtered by model, transmission and engine type. If a claim stands out as unusual, the team can drill down to learn more. Most importantly, insights that used to take days to uncover are now available in just a few clicks.

Results

Professional Advantage’s Qlik solution has made report generation faster and more accurate. Other departments now receive reports soon after requesting them, and warranty adjudicators say they prefer viewing data in dashboards instead of spreadsheets. Other benefits include:

• Reports produced in minutes, not days
• Faster response times when providing information about claims paid
• Ability to analyse claims with greater accuracy and depth
• Improved understanding of warranty trends within local markets
• Streamlined process for reconciling payments to dealers with reimbursements from the global Volkswagen Group

Building on this success, Volkswagen Group Australia plans to extend the solution throughout the business.

“We really didn’t need extensive training in the solution because the software is interactive and very easy to use. If you know the basics, which we learned from Professional Advantage during our training, you will be able to navigate Qlik quickly. Anyone can use it.”
Niveshn Chetty, Warranty Operations Team Leader

The Future

Currently in progress at VGA, is a project that aims to automate VGA monthly management KPI reports. The solution is being built using the QlikView platform and will include dynamic QlikView dashboards and printable PDF reports. This solution will replace a highly manual process that was previously done using Excel.

Next step in expanding the VGA analysis and reporting platform, is the deployment of Qlik NPrinting. This will provide automated delivery of pixel perfect PDF, Excel, Word and PowerPoint reports to users via email or web portal.  

VGA is also planning to expand its use of the Qlik Sense self-service platform throughout the enterprise. One of the priority projects is to enable 20 VGA business analysts and report writers to use the Qlik Sense platform to model their own data sources, create analyses and reports, and collaborate with other users. A comprehensive planning program has been developed and will be delivered early this year.